No kidding, and "each tapehead is unique like a snowflake" in the sense that it melts and becomes useless... When I was in college we swapped VHS tapes of shows that we liked and often someone would drop a compilation tape in the VCR during a party. Those tapes--and the VHS players--degraded to the point that they became mostly unwatchable in a matter of weeks. I hung on to a box of VHS tapes of the first few seasons of The Simpsons because the local TV commercials are hilarious and nostalgic, but what possible reason could I have for actually watching the actual episodes when I can queue them up via XMBC in far better quality from every room in the house?
Just how young are hipsters, anyway? (I live in a hipster-free part of the world.) Anyone that actually used VHS tapes appreciates YouTube, TiVo, and DVDs as far, far better replacements for a medium that is actually damaged through normal use... Ditto for cassette tapes; the day I could afford a CD player in my car is the day I threw away every cassette I owned... I mean, at least records don't degrade with (proper) usage and the needles can be replaced... but dragging a magnetic tape across a read head!?
If there really are priceless gems of movies that only exist on VHS then one hipster can digitize it and share it via his i-gadget; problem solved! And I'll even Like/+1/thumbs up/whatever it and comment on how totally retro his giant sunglasses in his profile pic are... I would rather suffer through compression artifacts, hunched over a 3" mobile phone with buffering issues trying to stream over YouTube than find an f-ing RCA cable, re-wind a tape, and fight with head-cleaners and vertical tracking for the "nostalgia" of crappy VHS tapes. What's next? Leaded gasoline for that "retro brain damage?" Calculator watches for that retro impractically-small-buttons feel? Velcro shoes that wear out as soon as they get near carpet fibers? Hey, why don't we go dig up Madonna's leathery corpse for a halftime show...oh, wait.
Sure, it's no longer as popular to hate on homosexual people as it was in the past, but we have all new forms of hatred and intolerance which our modern society deems acceptable, and which will be just as subject to the next generation's ridicule and derision.
You clearly haven't been following the GOP primaries very closely... Seriously, though, it's still as popular as ever, but fortunately the laws in many countries now punish this type of persecution, so bigots are relegated to nibbling around the edges of equal rights and stiring up hatred in countries that don't.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
I don't disagree, but I would point out that, at least in academic science, people are by far the most expensive part of research--even at the near-slave-wages that researchers are paid. I have no idea what a competent PI/PM costs on the black market (I mean, what is the tuition cost to get a doctorate in evil these days?), but no amount of infrastructure or materials can replace the expertise and knowledge needed to take findings from an article in Science and turn them into an effective weapon. If it were that easy to weaponize a virus, then one would think that Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan would have gone after biological weapons research in place or in addition to nuclear. Biological weapons strike me as a fine deterrent; stick a few on some missiles and put a big red button in a brief case, just like a nuke... possibly even scarier than nukes because of the novelty.
But the point, again, is that Science != Engineering and a lot of work has to be done to transfer a technology--even biological--from the laboratory to a blueprint for a weapon. I am not a biologist/virologist, but my understanding is that influenza viruses cannot survive in non-physiological conditions, so the current delivery vector would likely have to be a flock of birds (turkey cannons?). Give it a few decades to mature and I'm sure Johnny Terrorist will be whipping up deadly flu viruses in his bathtub, but for the time being it is not at all straightforward to engineer, grow, package, and a deploy a virus as a weapon.
Fair enough, though I think the argument then boils down to the open-source vs closed-source security argument. In this particular case, I would wager that there are a lot more "white hats" (e.g., academic scientists) than "black hats" (e.g., terrorists with the know-how to engineer a virus) looking at the source code. Also, a pay-walled scientific journal further inhibiting access to publicly-funded research by redacting experimental protocols, particularly just to avoid bad publicity from layman/journalists/politicians, makes my blood boil.
There is a huge difference between engineering plans for a weapon and the scientific research that underlies the technology; you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission. Granted, in this particular case, the scientific discovery also contains the blueprints for creating the virus, but the authors are certainly not disclosing plans for making a biological weapon. In fact, you can construct a nuclear weapon without knowing any of the underlying science, but someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper. And a nuclear weapon won't make itself. In this case, the authors have discovered that relatively small mutations can convert a benign virus into a deadly, pandemic-ready beast of a virus. Disclosing this information publicly will not change the probability of it occurring naturally through random mutation, will not enable your average terrorist to produce a weaponized virus, but it will spur the pro-active research of cures or preventative methods.
Think of it this way; I am a chemist. If I published a new and simple synthetic route to methamphetamine in Science, and then put photocopies of that paper under the windshield wipers of cars parked in front of every meth lab in the country, I would get sued by AAAS and exactly zero people in those labs would be able to utilize that information. If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy. Science != Engineering
-It's asynchronous, so you can still get information to people who are away from their desks, out sick, working different hours, etc.
For those of us who manage other people and whose productivity is directly proportional to the amount of uninterrupted concentration we are afforded for a particular task (which is usually to produce a document), email is a necessity. It drives me up the wall when someone (usually an older secretary) calls my office phone with some non-urgent question that could easily have been put in email form; if you are going to interrupt me, at least have the decency to come to my office in person. In fact, we had a meeting the other day to discuss whether or not office phones were necessary anymore.
I would add to the list that email can follow you when you travel. I can easily sit on a plane/train (in a "Silence" car) and answer emails offline on my laptop or discreetly fire off a reply from my phone when I'm sitting in a boring seminar. There is simply no way that chat/MMS/Skype/whatever will work in those situations. And as others have mentioned, complex thoughts/arguments are often better summarized in an email because you can gather your thoughts, proof-read your email, and then send a carbon-copy of that carefully worded text to all parties involved.
Ok, last post, just to clarify a few things. First, I don't get my information from Wikipedia, I get it from journal articles, gastroenterology symposiums and the like, so forgive me for not providing links. What you have to understand is that anecdotal evidence such as "I used to eat a lot of raw meat" is fine for a tongue-in-cheek argument, but does not contract multiple studies on the subject. If you want a recent, popular study someone wrote a book about "The China Study" which was specifically about health, lifespan and the consumption of meat. Second, people can not put on weight eating 800 calories a day if they burn more than that, period. That fact is rooted in second law of thermodynamics. Vegetable oil is not "always" made from anything in particular; it is made from whatever the cheapest oil at the time is. Currently that is predominantly palm oil. The whole reason that they are allowed to call it "vegetable oil" and not list a specific source is that it's composition can change. Lipid peroxidation is also known as "spoiling" and oxidized fats and fatty acids taste terrible because they are toxic. When ingested in their unadulterated form, they are oxidized in a controlled fashion by enzymes, principally via the flora in your gut, without which you would die (Google fecal transplants, it is a fascinating insight into just how dependent humans are on intestinal flora). Saturated fats may not oxidize as easily, but remember that fatty acids also act as and/or elicit hormonal responses that up or down regulate the levels of LDLs, HDLs, and even insulin, which is far more consequential than consuming a partially oxidized fatty acid. Moreover, the assertion that such oxidation increases the need for vitamin E is predicated on the fact that vitamin E is a fat-soluble anti-oxidant (i.e., it traps free radicals) and that eating more unsaturated fats will increase the levels of these fats in lipid bi-layers and is by no mean conclusive. In fact, saturated fats are incredibly difficult for the human body to oxidize because most lipase enzymes act on cis alkenes (hence the problem with trans fats). If you have ever heard of "omega fatty acids" and the various other names of monounsaturated fats that people take supplements like fish oil to get in their diets, it is because these are essential nutrients for organs such as the brain (they also regulate LDL/HDL levels, but have a positive impact at moderate levels of consumption). The metabolic cycles of fats are quite fascinating; if you have any background in Chemistry, I suggest "acquiring" an intro Biochemistry text book and reading up on it. The synthetic games that the body plays, like only dealing in even-numbered carbon chains, is a fascinating glimpse at how metabolic systems evolved. Cholesterol does belong to a class of molecules known as steroids, but this is only due to the ring structure; it is a quirk of evolution that animals use the same metabolic pathways to construct them. The purpose of cholesterol is actually to depress the freezing point of lipid membranes, which it does by disrupting the packing of the long-chain (saturated) alkyl chains of the lipids (i.e., it is a structural, material property). For example, the tissue in the hooves of rain deer are extremely rich in cholesterol so that the cell membranes do not freeze in the snow. The steroids that your body uses for hormones are readily synthesized by the body, as is cholesterol. Eating cholesterol in a different matter, as it raises the amount of cholesterol in your blood which can, over time, lead to the buildup of plaque on the walls of the arteries, etc.; you do not need to consume any cholesterol in your diet, though in small amounts it is not harmful... What else, oh, palm oil; yes, it was introduced, not as palm trees, but as a refining process. In fact the technology to extract the oil and the fact that palm leaves are abundant, labor is cheap, etc. lead to cheap palm oil in Asian markets flooding the market, providing a clear case study for its influence on healt
No argument here: varied diets with low to moderate intake of cholesterol, fats, and refined sugars are the way to go. Raw food diets are for idiots that want to spend money following trends. But eating uncooked meat is not good for you either.
To be fair; people that want to lose weight need to eat fewer calories than they burn. It doesn't matter if they eat cardboard or drink nothing but Mountain Dew. To lose weight healthfully is a bit more complicated.
Palm oil increases the risk of esophageal cancer. Asia has proven an wealth of information about how bad for us processed food is and palm oil is no exception; rates of esophageal cancer went from negligible to as-problematic-as-the-West as soon as it was introduced. (For those that don't know, anything labeled "vegetable oil" probably contains palm oil.) Polyunsaturated oils are not even remotely toxic in moderation. They are readily oxidized fats, making them a preferred energy source for bacteria in the gut. In return for eating these fats, they secrete all sorts of beneficial metabolites. Taking in large quantities, your body will start to absorb them, which human physiology is not a huge fan of.
Just because PETA says something is unethical doesn't mean it is.
There is nothing unethical about eating meat.
There is nothing unethical about eating whale, they are about as smart as pigs.
There is nothing unethical about eating dog or cat. It's just what you are used to.
It is unethical to try to impose your opinions on others. I'm looking at you herbivores.
But it is unethical to raise children with so little knowledge of where food comes from and how it impacts the environment that they think cows lay eggs.
Is the premise of this argument that eating meat is the healthiest possible course of action? If I'm to choose between a slight increase in the need for vitamin E and (maybe) slightly lowered levels of available oxygen over colon cancer and heart disease, I shall take the former. Also, those daaangerous polyunsaturated fats keep you regular and lower your risk of developing polyps. To put it another way, which is healthier: a 100% meat (real or test tube) diet, or a 100% plant diet? (Hint: one will lead to scurvy unless you are willing to eat rats, which produce their own vitamin C.)
I was raised butchering and eating meat that we grew in the backyard (plants too), but have been a vegetarian ever since I moved to the city where I'm left to trust a waiter that my hamburger was treated humanely or to eat the flavorless meat-like garbage that passes for meat at the grocery store. And I cannot eat dairy, which pretty much makes me vegan. I can also squat 160 kg and I haven't turned yellow, so my liver must be working and my muscles aren't atrophied... But clearly I'm not getting enough protein because I don't eat meat.
I don't even care a little what other people to chose to eat. Preachy vegetarians bug me, preachy vegans more so. But trying to build an argument that a plant-based diet is somehow unhealthy is like trying to argue that you shouldn't exercise because you might pull a muscle.
The most expensive part of research science is people. In Europe, a four-year PhD student runs about €250,000, which you have to procure before you can hire said student. A postdoc costs about the same for two years. Rates in the US are probably about the same, but some of the costs can be shifted to the university (for example, by allowing students to be paid for teaching).
The projects in the summary also all have the quality that they can be explained to non-experts. Try crowd sourcing €500,000 for a PhD student and some basic equipment to fund the synthesis of a series of conjugated molecules with different band-gaps because "trust us, this may have implications for electronics in 50 years." And what will you get from this? A couple of highly technical papers in pay-walled journals that "trust us, are really prestigious, so your money is well spent."
Crowd-sourcing $40,000 may be a fun publicity stunt, but until you can reliably add two zeros to that number, the answer is "no, you cannot fund science this way."
I use a Mac at work, and do most of my writing in LaTex or NeoOffice, but some of my colleagues insist on using docx and pptx files that just don't convert properly, forcing me to use MSOffice when we collaborate. I installed MS Office 2011, which fixes the compatibility problem, but brings my 2.8 GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM to a grinding halt--beach balls everywhere! Running Win7 with Office in Virtualbox is actually much faster, but a PITA just to work with MSOffice. I could easily see myself ditching OS X for Win7 if I were forced to work with MS Office all the time.
I don't expect changes to be made. Capitalistic culture has no thought of the future; people are selfish and will sacrifice their descendants to make things just a bit easier and more profitable to themselves.
Spot-on; however, if it was possible to become a billionaire by substantially reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, within 30 years the discussion would be about the dangerously-low levels of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. Create a profit motive and watch innovation flourish, but allow entrenched wealth to buy politicians and watch progress grind to a halt.
The sad part is that the people who actually pay the tax have virtually no say in the discussion. State governments look at their balance sheets and see a sharp decline in sales tax receipts so they try to apply sales tax to on-line shops only to find out that they do not have the legal right to tax a businesses in other states. An argument ensues between the states that want plug a hole in their budgets and giant on-line retailers that are greatly benefiting from being able to sell goods free of sales taxes. The people paying the tax..? Well, they don't get a say because money = speech and you have to have a very loud voice to lobby a senator.
Classify a trade as a sale (if it isn't already, it should be...) Institute a sales tax on all sales and you have an ability to tax HFT.
In theory, that is what capital gains taxes are, but in reality they just seem to be a way to tax wages at a higher rate than investment. But that raises another question: if you classify trading as sales, and tax all sales, do you adjust the rate for the type of sale? For instance, the proposed transaction tax is <1% but many national sales tax proposals (and the VAT in Europe) are around 20%. If so, then you may call it a sales tax, but it will function (and cost as the same to implement) as a transaction tax. I'm no fan of the current system, but I just don't see how simplifying the tax code is the answer to disincentivising deleterious trading practices.
High frequency trading (HFT) amounts to a tax that large financial firms levy by effectively inserting themselves in the transactions of third parties. If you agree that it is detrimental to the country, then how do you get rid of it? You can make a law against it, but enforcement costs money. You can tax it, which creates additional paperwork, but also generates revenue.
Thus, you have three options:
1) allow HFT to continue unfettered
2) spend money enforcing a law to prevent/curb HFT
3) make money by levying a tax against HFT and adjust the tax to achieve the desired level of HFT
I fail to see how simplifying the tax code impacts HFT...
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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First, I live in Europe, so my problem really isn't with American spending on entitlements; I happen to have these data on research spending available for something unrelated. Second, nowhere did I make the claim that congress allocates x for "research" and then makes sure that Defense spends most of it. However, almost every government does set a target for the percentage of total spending that goes towards research, say 4-5% for wealthy countries, and then adjusts accordingly when the budget reports come in, which is precisely why the US government can offer a spreadsheet summarizing all expenditures on research at gpoaccess.gov. Funding agencies prepare requests and justifications for a budget and the government uses those requests and guidelines, but the government will increase/decrease individual agencies to reflect national priorities and to keep the total spending on research in the target range.
What is out of whack, is that Defense has so much money, that the small percentage that it breaks off for research dwarfs what the congress explicitly sets aside for NASA, NIH, Energy, and NSF. If the budget for Defense was suddenly cut by a large amount, its spending on research would drop proportionally, which means that to maintain the target 4-5% total spending on research, congress would have to increase the budgets of NASA, NIH, Energy, NSF, etc., or create a new funding agency. Such a move would keep the total amount of funding for research constant, but dramatically shift the priorities attached to that funding as it would be under the purview of agencies with different goals than Defense. Cutting spending anywhere else would not affect research spending other than decreasing overall spending which would reduce the actual amount of money that comprises 4-5% of the budget.
My interest is only in how the priorities of the people are reflected in a nation's allocation of research spending. The distribution in the US suggests that war-making is a higher priority, by far, than all scientific research combined.
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
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From gpoaccess.gov: The total spending on research from the US government in 2010 was 4.2% of total outlays. Of that 4.2%, 4% went to the NSF, 6% to NASA, 2% to Energy, 23% to NIH, and 57% to Defense. Spending on "Defense" is so far out of whack that even the small portion of federal spending allocated to research is dominated by the military. The entire budget for the NSF, which funds research from all disciplines of science, was about $8 billion. The budget for the Missile Defense Agency, which is funded through the DoD for the specific task of developing missile defense technologies was about $7 billion. I constantly see stories about how the US is investing in STEM, trying to produce more scientists and engineers, and creating a "green economy" by investing in sustainable energy, but these numbers tell a different story: that the US places the priority of war-making so much higher than anything else, that the military is tasked with deciding how the vast majority of taxpayer dollars are invested in basic research.
What you describe is certainly true for TAs, but it can be even worse for the Prof, particularly if the evidence is not iron-clad and the cheating egregious. And if the media get wind of a prof being accused of racism and sexual harassment, you can be sure that the story won't be about frivolous and baseless allegations from a student caught cheating.
When I was a TA we used to catch cheaters on a fairly regular basis, but typically it was not worth the effort to take official action, so the students were essentially told "we know you copied each other on the homework/quiz, and we will be watching you closely on the midterm/final." For big lectures, we would produce two to four versions of a quiz, and then alternate them to prevent "accidentally seeing each others' answers" and it was shocking how many people turned in Quiz A with answers from Quiz B.
Once, while teaching for a lecturer (i.e., not a research prof), someone broke into her office and went through her computer, looking for answers to the midterm. What shocked me was how well-prepared she was for such an intrusion, citing the fact that she never, ever left test answers on her computer at work, instead using a laptop that she kept on her person (and this was in the Stone Age when lectures were still on acetate slides). This preparedness lead me to believe that this seasoned lecturer had encountered a lot of cheating in her career. When test time rolled around, we locked the lecture hall down, forcing students to lay their IDs on their desks (a seldom-enforced rule), but we weren't even sure that the thieves were in the class (stealing and reselling test answers was a small black market industry). We even had to follow students to the bathrooms--fun. One poor kid was sick, and had to leave every fifteen minutes or so to puke in the trashcan in front of the lecture hall, which I had to watch. Every time.
The biggest incident of cheating that I have seen to date was a graduate student that plagiarized his entire proposal for his advancement to candidacy. He literally removed his wife's name (who was a graduate student at another university, in a different field) and replaced it with his. Since he had been caught plagiarizing before, his committee was suspicious of the bizarre topic an did a little digging. I don't know what happened behind closed doors, but he was made to re-do the proposal, was caught plagiarizing parts of the new proposal, but still managed to get a PhD.
We used to have cumulative exams, which meant that you showed up to the library on Saturday morning with no beforehand knowledge of the topic or content or author of the exam. It was remarkable to see some of the top students in the class fail these exams consistently and thoroughly. And even more remarkable to see the effort that some people would go through (including but not limited to breaking into email accounts) just to find out who was giving the exam, or to get their hands on old exams, both of which were technically cheating.
Since leaving that university, I have only taught small classes of 20-50 students, and the apparent incident of cheating has dropped to zero. In fact, I don't even know what our policy regarding cheaters is because it hasn't come up.
When discussing the supposed link between autism and the Bay Area, perhaps people should consider that it is a giant pit of mercury. During the Gold Rush "quicksilver" mines sprung up everywhere, particularly in South Bay/Santa Clara (i.e., Silicon Valley). The mercury was also haplessly spread around in the gold mining process. To this day, there are signs all over the place---parks, hiking trails, creeks, etc.---warning of mercury contamination. But before modern regulations, Silicon Valley was a giant orchard, probably producing mercury-laden fruit, but who knows (no one was keeping track).
The link between mercury-stabilized vaccines and autism has been debunked, but mercury itself does cause all kinds of neurological disorders (mad as a hatter and all that), particularly in utero, and including autism. I am not suggesting that there is a link, only asking if anyone knows of any study that has posed the question or even taken it into account in studies about autism in the Bay Area. My anecdotal evidence suggests that people immediately jump to the "computer nerds are autistic" conclusion, without considering that there may be other, historical factors at work.
I find it remarkable how little people seem to understand about addiction. Perhaps that is why people who want to keep MJ a Schedule 1 narcotic use it as an excuse.
Your brain produces chemicals that cause pleasure, deep down in the reptile brain. These are called reward pathways, and the most prevalent is the dopamine reward pathway. They work exactly like a rat hitting the button for a food pellet, but their triggers are rooted in evolution. For example, when you eat fatty foods, even though you know it is bad for you, you enjoy it and you crave more of it because foods that is dense in fat and simple sugars are rare in Nature, so evolution favored those whose brains rewarded them for seeking out and consuming these foods.
When the levels of a particular reward-pathway-chemical (let's call them endorphins) remain high your brain does what it always does when presented with a constant stimulus; it learns to ignore it, typically by becoming less sensitive to that endorphin (e.g., decreasing the number of receptors for it.) If you take that endorphin away suddenly, you experience withdraw as your brain re-adapts to the lower levels of that endorphin (many of which are required at some level for normal brain functions.)
People can become "addicted" to running or weight lifting or any other type of physical exercise because the endorphins that the body released cause a good feeling. Conversely, when one doesn't work out for a while, the body craves those endorphins and causes that nagging "I need to go to the gym" feeling.
Nicotine bypasses the normal route of the brain releasing an endorphin to reinforce "productive" behavior and just ramps up the dopamine reward pathway for no good reason. When I was trying to quit smoking, I would get a mad craving---even months after having abstained---when I got in the car, because I had conditioned myself to smoke when I got in the car. You can use cigarettes to create such a positive reinforcement for almost any behavior. Opiates (heroine, morphine, etc.) mimic chemicals that your brain produces in small quantities for various reasons (including reward) rather than just pushing the reward button directly, like nicotine.
Even strong chemical addictions like opiates and nicotine are somewhat contextual. For instance, the rate of addiction to morphine from medical treatment is near zero, because you do not form a positive connection between morphine and reward. Soldiers coming back from Vietnam were addicted to heroin in huge numbers, but had a much, much easier time quitting than the average addict because they never did heroin in the context of their normal lives back home.
Like exercising or eating fatty foods, consuming marijuana also triggers reward pathways, but exponentially less than nicotine or opiates (or alcohol). Thus, it does not create chemical dependance--but it can lead to mild addiction. Playing video games also triggers reward pathways and, if you smoke pot every time you play a video game, the act of playing a video game can induce a craving for pot. Likewise, if you smoke strains that cause the munchies, and stuff your face with Little Debbie snack cakes every time you smoke pot, then you are inadvertently conditioning your body to connect the positive-reinforcement of eating fatty foods with smoking pot. So which is addictive? The snack cakes, the video games, or the pot?
Non-chemical addiction works exactly the same way, but rather than being associated with a particular reward pathway, it is just "habit" (conditioning). If my evening routine is to come home and take a bong hit, then when I don't get that bong hit, I feel as if something is off (and may become irritable as a result.) The same is true of drinking a beer when you come home, or eating at McDonalds on Friday.
Smoking pot long-term does cause structural changes in the brain. But so does learning the piano or a second language. If you smoke pot every day to relax, then you will be a bit irritable when you stop. If you smoke c
Really? Then why aren't the protesting their University for putting them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that isn't worth a tenth of that? You know, the universities sitting on multi-billion dollar endowments yet are raising tuition many times the rate of inflation? In an age where information is vastly cheaper and easier to acquire, they are making it much harder and more expensive.
The fact they are blaming Wall St, which has absolutely nothing to do with their degrees' cost, shows their university did not provide them with the necessary critical thinking skills to make it in the world.
A better question is, why didn't the national media cover the numerous protests against universities? It isn't limited to the US either. In some countries, students simply sue the universities. But, none of these stories fit the narrative, so they don't get the same coverage as, say, politicians whose policies are responsible for the multimillion dollar salaries of the talking heads that are supposed to keep us informed about these things.
It took weeks for Occupy Wall St to become national news because, again, it doesn't fit the narrative; didn't you know, Wall St paid back TARP!*
*Using some of the $17 trillion in low/no-interest loans from the Fed, which supposedly exists to keep unemployment low.
You could cut all funding for scientific research or 10% from Defense. In the former cause you would decimate the American university system, and the economy as a whole. In the latter case you might have to do without the Joint Strike Fighter (the total cost of which is ten times the entire research budget) or about four nuclear subs. In neither case would you even put a dent in overall spending. A bit more perspective: federal spending on research is equal to approximately %30 of the amount paid for interest on the National Debt.
Fighting over rounding errors in the budget like funding for research, the top income tax rate, education, etc. is simply another way to divert attention from Defense and Health and Human Services, which are by themselves larger than the economies of many countries.
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
Three examples from the late 20th century where tax-cuts lead to increased revenues: JFK, Reagan, and Clinton. However, on closer inspection, JFK cut taxes while closing loopholes, citing his own family as an example of how the wealthy evaded taxes. Rich people pulled their money out of tax shelters because that is exactly what JFK forced them to do by closing said loopholes. Reagan's tax cutting lead to a decrease in tax receipts, but they were coupled with deregulations of financial markets (and two subsequent tax increases) that increased revenues overall. This deregulation arguably lead to the creation of bubbles (e.g., Black Monday), which landed in the lap of Bush 1.0 and lead to him raising taxes. Clinton cut taxes as well, but focused them on the middle class, and again tax receipts were not the primary source of growth, it was the Dot Com Bubble, which arguably lead to the 2001 recession at the start of Bush 2.0. Speaking of Bush 2.0, he also cut taxes--dramatically--and passed on a huge deficit and a Carter-style recession to Obama.
I am not trying to argue with you, nor am I defending the policies of any administration, I just want to point out that the world is vastly more complicated than "cutting taxes increases revenues." Also, American presidents have developed a habit of increasing spending/cutting taxes and using creative accounting/deregulation to make themselves look good, and then passing an economic shit sandwich on to the next administration.
There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?
If the rich get richer faster than the overall economy is growing, then the poor get poorer--either by direct loss or by incurring more debt. I refuse to use a pie analogy, but the economy is finite in size and when it shrinks, those whose wealth increases are by definition gaining at the expense of others. Reasonable People do not have a problem with "the rich getting richer;" they have a problem with the rich getting richer at the expense of the middle class. Again, not trying to pick a fight, just trying to contextualize your question.
Disclaimer: I don't even live in the US; I make my modest income in Euros in a country with a 50% income tax rate and a 20% sales tax.
For me it is my US Robots 9600 bps modem (the cool sysops had them too). I remember the arms race of modems, when I was so jealous of my friend's 300 bps modem that you put the handset of the telephone on to use, and my hands shaking with excitement when I opened the box that contained a brand-new, screaming-fast 2400 bps modem of my very own. But for some reason, it is that USR 9600 with the slick white plastic case of early 90's hardware and the array of LEDs blinking furiously while I carefully planned my next move in Trade Wars. I actually dug up the phone line between our house and the box at the street (we lived in the forrest, so that was a few hundred meters) and laid a new one in order to max out the subsequent 14.4 kpbs beauty. That and Commander Keen.
...Yesterday I was perplexed that my new Boxee Box only came with 2.4 GHz 802.11n and a 10/100 Ethernet adapter.
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No kidding, and "each tapehead is unique like a snowflake" in the sense that it melts and becomes useless... When I was in college we swapped VHS tapes of shows that we liked and often someone would drop a compilation tape in the VCR during a party. Those tapes--and the VHS players--degraded to the point that they became mostly unwatchable in a matter of weeks. I hung on to a box of VHS tapes of the first few seasons of The Simpsons because the local TV commercials are hilarious and nostalgic, but what possible reason could I have for actually watching the actual episodes when I can queue them up via XMBC in far better quality from every room in the house?
Just how young are hipsters, anyway? (I live in a hipster-free part of the world.) Anyone that actually used VHS tapes appreciates YouTube, TiVo, and DVDs as far, far better replacements for a medium that is actually damaged through normal use... Ditto for cassette tapes; the day I could afford a CD player in my car is the day I threw away every cassette I owned... I mean, at least records don't degrade with (proper) usage and the needles can be replaced... but dragging a magnetic tape across a read head!?
If there really are priceless gems of movies that only exist on VHS then one hipster can digitize it and share it via his i-gadget; problem solved! And I'll even Like/+1/thumbs up/whatever it and comment on how totally retro his giant sunglasses in his profile pic are... I would rather suffer through compression artifacts, hunched over a 3" mobile phone with buffering issues trying to stream over YouTube than find an f-ing RCA cable, re-wind a tape, and fight with head-cleaners and vertical tracking for the "nostalgia" of crappy VHS tapes. What's next? Leaded gasoline for that "retro brain damage?" Calculator watches for that retro impractically-small-buttons feel? Velcro shoes that wear out as soon as they get near carpet fibers? Hey, why don't we go dig up Madonna's leathery corpse for a halftime show...oh, wait.
Sure, it's no longer as popular to hate on homosexual people as it was in the past, but we have all new forms of hatred and intolerance which our modern society deems acceptable, and which will be just as subject to the next generation's ridicule and derision.
You clearly haven't been following the GOP primaries very closely... Seriously, though, it's still as popular as ever, but fortunately the laws in many countries now punish this type of persecution, so bigots are relegated to nibbling around the edges of equal rights and stiring up hatred in countries that don't.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
I don't disagree, but I would point out that, at least in academic science, people are by far the most expensive part of research--even at the near-slave-wages that researchers are paid. I have no idea what a competent PI/PM costs on the black market (I mean, what is the tuition cost to get a doctorate in evil these days?), but no amount of infrastructure or materials can replace the expertise and knowledge needed to take findings from an article in Science and turn them into an effective weapon. If it were that easy to weaponize a virus, then one would think that Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan would have gone after biological weapons research in place or in addition to nuclear. Biological weapons strike me as a fine deterrent; stick a few on some missiles and put a big red button in a brief case, just like a nuke... possibly even scarier than nukes because of the novelty.
But the point, again, is that Science != Engineering and a lot of work has to be done to transfer a technology--even biological--from the laboratory to a blueprint for a weapon. I am not a biologist/virologist, but my understanding is that influenza viruses cannot survive in non-physiological conditions, so the current delivery vector would likely have to be a flock of birds (turkey cannons?). Give it a few decades to mature and I'm sure Johnny Terrorist will be whipping up deadly flu viruses in his bathtub, but for the time being it is not at all straightforward to engineer, grow, package, and a deploy a virus as a weapon.
Fair enough, though I think the argument then boils down to the open-source vs closed-source security argument. In this particular case, I would wager that there are a lot more "white hats" (e.g., academic scientists) than "black hats" (e.g., terrorists with the know-how to engineer a virus) looking at the source code. Also, a pay-walled scientific journal further inhibiting access to publicly-funded research by redacting experimental protocols, particularly just to avoid bad publicity from layman/journalists/politicians, makes my blood boil.
There is a huge difference between engineering plans for a weapon and the scientific research that underlies the technology; you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission. Granted, in this particular case, the scientific discovery also contains the blueprints for creating the virus, but the authors are certainly not disclosing plans for making a biological weapon. In fact, you can construct a nuclear weapon without knowing any of the underlying science, but someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper. And a nuclear weapon won't make itself. In this case, the authors have discovered that relatively small mutations can convert a benign virus into a deadly, pandemic-ready beast of a virus. Disclosing this information publicly will not change the probability of it occurring naturally through random mutation, will not enable your average terrorist to produce a weaponized virus, but it will spur the pro-active research of cures or preventative methods.
Think of it this way; I am a chemist. If I published a new and simple synthetic route to methamphetamine in Science, and then put photocopies of that paper under the windshield wipers of cars parked in front of every meth lab in the country, I would get sued by AAAS and exactly zero people in those labs would be able to utilize that information. If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy. Science != Engineering
-It's asynchronous, so you can still get information to people who are away from their desks, out sick, working different hours, etc.
For those of us who manage other people and whose productivity is directly proportional to the amount of uninterrupted concentration we are afforded for a particular task (which is usually to produce a document), email is a necessity. It drives me up the wall when someone (usually an older secretary) calls my office phone with some non-urgent question that could easily have been put in email form; if you are going to interrupt me, at least have the decency to come to my office in person. In fact, we had a meeting the other day to discuss whether or not office phones were necessary anymore.
I would add to the list that email can follow you when you travel. I can easily sit on a plane/train (in a "Silence" car) and answer emails offline on my laptop or discreetly fire off a reply from my phone when I'm sitting in a boring seminar. There is simply no way that chat/MMS/Skype/whatever will work in those situations. And as others have mentioned, complex thoughts/arguments are often better summarized in an email because you can gather your thoughts, proof-read your email, and then send a carbon-copy of that carefully worded text to all parties involved.
Ok, last post, just to clarify a few things. First, I don't get my information from Wikipedia, I get it from journal articles, gastroenterology symposiums and the like, so forgive me for not providing links. What you have to understand is that anecdotal evidence such as "I used to eat a lot of raw meat" is fine for a tongue-in-cheek argument, but does not contract multiple studies on the subject. If you want a recent, popular study someone wrote a book about "The China Study" which was specifically about health, lifespan and the consumption of meat. Second, people can not put on weight eating 800 calories a day if they burn more than that, period. That fact is rooted in second law of thermodynamics. Vegetable oil is not "always" made from anything in particular; it is made from whatever the cheapest oil at the time is. Currently that is predominantly palm oil. The whole reason that they are allowed to call it "vegetable oil" and not list a specific source is that it's composition can change. Lipid peroxidation is also known as "spoiling" and oxidized fats and fatty acids taste terrible because they are toxic. When ingested in their unadulterated form, they are oxidized in a controlled fashion by enzymes, principally via the flora in your gut, without which you would die (Google fecal transplants, it is a fascinating insight into just how dependent humans are on intestinal flora). Saturated fats may not oxidize as easily, but remember that fatty acids also act as and/or elicit hormonal responses that up or down regulate the levels of LDLs, HDLs, and even insulin, which is far more consequential than consuming a partially oxidized fatty acid. Moreover, the assertion that such oxidation increases the need for vitamin E is predicated on the fact that vitamin E is a fat-soluble anti-oxidant (i.e., it traps free radicals) and that eating more unsaturated fats will increase the levels of these fats in lipid bi-layers and is by no mean conclusive. In fact, saturated fats are incredibly difficult for the human body to oxidize because most lipase enzymes act on cis alkenes (hence the problem with trans fats). If you have ever heard of "omega fatty acids" and the various other names of monounsaturated fats that people take supplements like fish oil to get in their diets, it is because these are essential nutrients for organs such as the brain (they also regulate LDL/HDL levels, but have a positive impact at moderate levels of consumption). The metabolic cycles of fats are quite fascinating; if you have any background in Chemistry, I suggest "acquiring" an intro Biochemistry text book and reading up on it. The synthetic games that the body plays, like only dealing in even-numbered carbon chains, is a fascinating glimpse at how metabolic systems evolved. Cholesterol does belong to a class of molecules known as steroids, but this is only due to the ring structure; it is a quirk of evolution that animals use the same metabolic pathways to construct them. The purpose of cholesterol is actually to depress the freezing point of lipid membranes, which it does by disrupting the packing of the long-chain (saturated) alkyl chains of the lipids (i.e., it is a structural, material property). For example, the tissue in the hooves of rain deer are extremely rich in cholesterol so that the cell membranes do not freeze in the snow. The steroids that your body uses for hormones are readily synthesized by the body, as is cholesterol. Eating cholesterol in a different matter, as it raises the amount of cholesterol in your blood which can, over time, lead to the buildup of plaque on the walls of the arteries, etc.; you do not need to consume any cholesterol in your diet, though in small amounts it is not harmful... What else, oh, palm oil; yes, it was introduced, not as palm trees, but as a refining process. In fact the technology to extract the oil and the fact that palm leaves are abundant, labor is cheap, etc. lead to cheap palm oil in Asian markets flooding the market, providing a clear case study for its influence on healt
No argument here: varied diets with low to moderate intake of cholesterol, fats, and refined sugars are the way to go. Raw food diets are for idiots that want to spend money following trends. But eating uncooked meat is not good for you either.
To be fair; people that want to lose weight need to eat fewer calories than they burn. It doesn't matter if they eat cardboard or drink nothing but Mountain Dew. To lose weight healthfully is a bit more complicated.
Palm oil increases the risk of esophageal cancer. Asia has proven an wealth of information about how bad for us processed food is and palm oil is no exception; rates of esophageal cancer went from negligible to as-problematic-as-the-West as soon as it was introduced. (For those that don't know, anything labeled "vegetable oil" probably contains palm oil.) Polyunsaturated oils are not even remotely toxic in moderation. They are readily oxidized fats, making them a preferred energy source for bacteria in the gut. In return for eating these fats, they secrete all sorts of beneficial metabolites. Taking in large quantities, your body will start to absorb them, which human physiology is not a huge fan of.
Just because PETA says something is unethical doesn't mean it is.
There is nothing unethical about eating meat.
There is nothing unethical about eating whale, they are about as smart as pigs.
There is nothing unethical about eating dog or cat. It's just what you are used to.
It is unethical to try to impose your opinions on others. I'm looking at you herbivores.
But it is unethical to raise children with so little knowledge of where food comes from and how it impacts the environment that they think cows lay eggs.
Is the premise of this argument that eating meat is the healthiest possible course of action? If I'm to choose between a slight increase in the need for vitamin E and (maybe) slightly lowered levels of available oxygen over colon cancer and heart disease, I shall take the former. Also, those daaangerous polyunsaturated fats keep you regular and lower your risk of developing polyps. To put it another way, which is healthier: a 100% meat (real or test tube) diet, or a 100% plant diet? (Hint: one will lead to scurvy unless you are willing to eat rats, which produce their own vitamin C.)
I was raised butchering and eating meat that we grew in the backyard (plants too), but have been a vegetarian ever since I moved to the city where I'm left to trust a waiter that my hamburger was treated humanely or to eat the flavorless meat-like garbage that passes for meat at the grocery store. And I cannot eat dairy, which pretty much makes me vegan. I can also squat 160 kg and I haven't turned yellow, so my liver must be working and my muscles aren't atrophied... But clearly I'm not getting enough protein because I don't eat meat.
I don't even care a little what other people to chose to eat. Preachy vegetarians bug me, preachy vegans more so. But trying to build an argument that a plant-based diet is somehow unhealthy is like trying to argue that you shouldn't exercise because you might pull a muscle.
The most expensive part of research science is people. In Europe, a four-year PhD student runs about €250,000, which you have to procure before you can hire said student. A postdoc costs about the same for two years. Rates in the US are probably about the same, but some of the costs can be shifted to the university (for example, by allowing students to be paid for teaching).
The projects in the summary also all have the quality that they can be explained to non-experts. Try crowd sourcing €500,000 for a PhD student and some basic equipment to fund the synthesis of a series of conjugated molecules with different band-gaps because "trust us, this may have implications for electronics in 50 years." And what will you get from this? A couple of highly technical papers in pay-walled journals that "trust us, are really prestigious, so your money is well spent."
Crowd-sourcing $40,000 may be a fun publicity stunt, but until you can reliably add two zeros to that number, the answer is "no, you cannot fund science this way."
I use a Mac at work, and do most of my writing in LaTex or NeoOffice, but some of my colleagues insist on using docx and pptx files that just don't convert properly, forcing me to use MSOffice when we collaborate. I installed MS Office 2011, which fixes the compatibility problem, but brings my 2.8 GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM to a grinding halt--beach balls everywhere! Running Win7 with Office in Virtualbox is actually much faster, but a PITA just to work with MSOffice. I could easily see myself ditching OS X for Win7 if I were forced to work with MS Office all the time.
I don't expect changes to be made. Capitalistic culture has no thought of the future; people are selfish and will sacrifice their descendants to make things just a bit easier and more profitable to themselves.
Spot-on; however, if it was possible to become a billionaire by substantially reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, within 30 years the discussion would be about the dangerously-low levels of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. Create a profit motive and watch innovation flourish, but allow entrenched wealth to buy politicians and watch progress grind to a halt.
The sad part is that the people who actually pay the tax have virtually no say in the discussion. State governments look at their balance sheets and see a sharp decline in sales tax receipts so they try to apply sales tax to on-line shops only to find out that they do not have the legal right to tax a businesses in other states. An argument ensues between the states that want plug a hole in their budgets and giant on-line retailers that are greatly benefiting from being able to sell goods free of sales taxes. The people paying the tax..? Well, they don't get a say because money = speech and you have to have a very loud voice to lobby a senator.
Classify a trade as a sale (if it isn't already, it should be...) Institute a sales tax on all sales and you have an ability to tax HFT.
In theory, that is what capital gains taxes are, but in reality they just seem to be a way to tax wages at a higher rate than investment. But that raises another question: if you classify trading as sales, and tax all sales, do you adjust the rate for the type of sale? For instance, the proposed transaction tax is <1% but many national sales tax proposals (and the VAT in Europe) are around 20%. If so, then you may call it a sales tax, but it will function (and cost as the same to implement) as a transaction tax. I'm no fan of the current system, but I just don't see how simplifying the tax code is the answer to disincentivising deleterious trading practices.
High frequency trading (HFT) amounts to a tax that large financial firms levy by effectively inserting themselves in the transactions of third parties. If you agree that it is detrimental to the country, then how do you get rid of it? You can make a law against it, but enforcement costs money. You can tax it, which creates additional paperwork, but also generates revenue.
Thus, you have three options:
1) allow HFT to continue unfettered
2) spend money enforcing a law to prevent/curb HFT
3) make money by levying a tax against HFT and adjust the tax to achieve the desired level of HFT
I fail to see how simplifying the tax code impacts HFT...
First, I live in Europe, so my problem really isn't with American spending on entitlements; I happen to have these data on research spending available for something unrelated. Second, nowhere did I make the claim that congress allocates x for "research" and then makes sure that Defense spends most of it. However, almost every government does set a target for the percentage of total spending that goes towards research, say 4-5% for wealthy countries, and then adjusts accordingly when the budget reports come in, which is precisely why the US government can offer a spreadsheet summarizing all expenditures on research at gpoaccess.gov. Funding agencies prepare requests and justifications for a budget and the government uses those requests and guidelines, but the government will increase/decrease individual agencies to reflect national priorities and to keep the total spending on research in the target range.
What is out of whack, is that Defense has so much money, that the small percentage that it breaks off for research dwarfs what the congress explicitly sets aside for NASA, NIH, Energy, and NSF. If the budget for Defense was suddenly cut by a large amount, its spending on research would drop proportionally, which means that to maintain the target 4-5% total spending on research, congress would have to increase the budgets of NASA, NIH, Energy, NSF, etc., or create a new funding agency. Such a move would keep the total amount of funding for research constant, but dramatically shift the priorities attached to that funding as it would be under the purview of agencies with different goals than Defense. Cutting spending anywhere else would not affect research spending other than decreasing overall spending which would reduce the actual amount of money that comprises 4-5% of the budget.
My interest is only in how the priorities of the people are reflected in a nation's allocation of research spending. The distribution in the US suggests that war-making is a higher priority, by far, than all scientific research combined.
Thus, when military industrial complex spending (not DoD or pentagon budget) is at 1.4 TRILLION per year, and this F35 program alone costs $300 BILLION http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/04/21/hackers-infiltrate-pentagons-300-billion-fighter-jet-project/ , people are wondering why the $8BN budget for the NSF is facing cuts, despite national funding of science being a major player in human benefit.
From gpoaccess.gov: The total spending on research from the US government in 2010 was 4.2% of total outlays. Of that 4.2%, 4% went to the NSF, 6% to NASA, 2% to Energy, 23% to NIH, and 57% to Defense. Spending on "Defense" is so far out of whack that even the small portion of federal spending allocated to research is dominated by the military. The entire budget for the NSF, which funds research from all disciplines of science, was about $8 billion. The budget for the Missile Defense Agency, which is funded through the DoD for the specific task of developing missile defense technologies was about $7 billion. I constantly see stories about how the US is investing in STEM, trying to produce more scientists and engineers, and creating a "green economy" by investing in sustainable energy, but these numbers tell a different story: that the US places the priority of war-making so much higher than anything else, that the military is tasked with deciding how the vast majority of taxpayer dollars are invested in basic research.
What you describe is certainly true for TAs, but it can be even worse for the Prof, particularly if the evidence is not iron-clad and the cheating egregious. And if the media get wind of a prof being accused of racism and sexual harassment, you can be sure that the story won't be about frivolous and baseless allegations from a student caught cheating.
When I was a TA we used to catch cheaters on a fairly regular basis, but typically it was not worth the effort to take official action, so the students were essentially told "we know you copied each other on the homework/quiz, and we will be watching you closely on the midterm/final." For big lectures, we would produce two to four versions of a quiz, and then alternate them to prevent "accidentally seeing each others' answers" and it was shocking how many people turned in Quiz A with answers from Quiz B.
Once, while teaching for a lecturer (i.e., not a research prof), someone broke into her office and went through her computer, looking for answers to the midterm. What shocked me was how well-prepared she was for such an intrusion, citing the fact that she never, ever left test answers on her computer at work, instead using a laptop that she kept on her person (and this was in the Stone Age when lectures were still on acetate slides). This preparedness lead me to believe that this seasoned lecturer had encountered a lot of cheating in her career. When test time rolled around, we locked the lecture hall down, forcing students to lay their IDs on their desks (a seldom-enforced rule), but we weren't even sure that the thieves were in the class (stealing and reselling test answers was a small black market industry). We even had to follow students to the bathrooms--fun. One poor kid was sick, and had to leave every fifteen minutes or so to puke in the trashcan in front of the lecture hall, which I had to watch. Every time.
The biggest incident of cheating that I have seen to date was a graduate student that plagiarized his entire proposal for his advancement to candidacy. He literally removed his wife's name (who was a graduate student at another university, in a different field) and replaced it with his. Since he had been caught plagiarizing before, his committee was suspicious of the bizarre topic an did a little digging. I don't know what happened behind closed doors, but he was made to re-do the proposal, was caught plagiarizing parts of the new proposal, but still managed to get a PhD.
We used to have cumulative exams, which meant that you showed up to the library on Saturday morning with no beforehand knowledge of the topic or content or author of the exam. It was remarkable to see some of the top students in the class fail these exams consistently and thoroughly. And even more remarkable to see the effort that some people would go through (including but not limited to breaking into email accounts) just to find out who was giving the exam, or to get their hands on old exams, both of which were technically cheating.
Since leaving that university, I have only taught small classes of 20-50 students, and the apparent incident of cheating has dropped to zero. In fact, I don't even know what our policy regarding cheaters is because it hasn't come up.
When discussing the supposed link between autism and the Bay Area, perhaps people should consider that it is a giant pit of mercury. During the Gold Rush "quicksilver" mines sprung up everywhere, particularly in South Bay/Santa Clara (i.e., Silicon Valley). The mercury was also haplessly spread around in the gold mining process. To this day, there are signs all over the place---parks, hiking trails, creeks, etc.---warning of mercury contamination. But before modern regulations, Silicon Valley was a giant orchard, probably producing mercury-laden fruit, but who knows (no one was keeping track).
The link between mercury-stabilized vaccines and autism has been debunked, but mercury itself does cause all kinds of neurological disorders (mad as a hatter and all that), particularly in utero, and including autism. I am not suggesting that there is a link, only asking if anyone knows of any study that has posed the question or even taken it into account in studies about autism in the Bay Area. My anecdotal evidence suggests that people immediately jump to the "computer nerds are autistic" conclusion, without considering that there may be other, historical factors at work.
I find it remarkable how little people seem to understand about addiction. Perhaps that is why people who want to keep MJ a Schedule 1 narcotic use it as an excuse.
Your brain produces chemicals that cause pleasure, deep down in the reptile brain. These are called reward pathways, and the most prevalent is the dopamine reward pathway. They work exactly like a rat hitting the button for a food pellet, but their triggers are rooted in evolution. For example, when you eat fatty foods, even though you know it is bad for you, you enjoy it and you crave more of it because foods that is dense in fat and simple sugars are rare in Nature, so evolution favored those whose brains rewarded them for seeking out and consuming these foods.
When the levels of a particular reward-pathway-chemical (let's call them endorphins) remain high your brain does what it always does when presented with a constant stimulus; it learns to ignore it, typically by becoming less sensitive to that endorphin (e.g., decreasing the number of receptors for it.) If you take that endorphin away suddenly, you experience withdraw as your brain re-adapts to the lower levels of that endorphin (many of which are required at some level for normal brain functions.)
People can become "addicted" to running or weight lifting or any other type of physical exercise because the endorphins that the body released cause a good feeling. Conversely, when one doesn't work out for a while, the body craves those endorphins and causes that nagging "I need to go to the gym" feeling.
Nicotine bypasses the normal route of the brain releasing an endorphin to reinforce "productive" behavior and just ramps up the dopamine reward pathway for no good reason. When I was trying to quit smoking, I would get a mad craving---even months after having abstained---when I got in the car, because I had conditioned myself to smoke when I got in the car. You can use cigarettes to create such a positive reinforcement for almost any behavior. Opiates (heroine, morphine, etc.) mimic chemicals that your brain produces in small quantities for various reasons (including reward) rather than just pushing the reward button directly, like nicotine.
Even strong chemical addictions like opiates and nicotine are somewhat contextual. For instance, the rate of addiction to morphine from medical treatment is near zero, because you do not form a positive connection between morphine and reward. Soldiers coming back from Vietnam were addicted to heroin in huge numbers, but had a much, much easier time quitting than the average addict because they never did heroin in the context of their normal lives back home.
Like exercising or eating fatty foods, consuming marijuana also triggers reward pathways, but exponentially less than nicotine or opiates (or alcohol). Thus, it does not create chemical dependance--but it can lead to mild addiction. Playing video games also triggers reward pathways and, if you smoke pot every time you play a video game, the act of playing a video game can induce a craving for pot. Likewise, if you smoke strains that cause the munchies, and stuff your face with Little Debbie snack cakes every time you smoke pot, then you are inadvertently conditioning your body to connect the positive-reinforcement of eating fatty foods with smoking pot. So which is addictive? The snack cakes, the video games, or the pot?
Non-chemical addiction works exactly the same way, but rather than being associated with a particular reward pathway, it is just "habit" (conditioning). If my evening routine is to come home and take a bong hit, then when I don't get that bong hit, I feel as if something is off (and may become irritable as a result.) The same is true of drinking a beer when you come home, or eating at McDonalds on Friday.
Smoking pot long-term does cause structural changes in the brain. But so does learning the piano or a second language. If you smoke pot every day to relax, then you will be a bit irritable when you stop. If you smoke c
Really? Then why aren't the protesting their University for putting them tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for a degree that isn't worth a tenth of that? You know, the universities sitting on multi-billion dollar endowments yet are raising tuition many times the rate of inflation? In an age where information is vastly cheaper and easier to acquire, they are making it much harder and more expensive.
The fact they are blaming Wall St, which has absolutely nothing to do with their degrees' cost, shows their university did not provide them with the necessary critical thinking skills to make it in the world.
A better question is, why didn't the national media cover the numerous protests against universities? It isn't limited to the US either. In some countries, students simply sue the universities. But, none of these stories fit the narrative, so they don't get the same coverage as, say, politicians whose policies are responsible for the multimillion dollar salaries of the talking heads that are supposed to keep us informed about these things.
It took weeks for Occupy Wall St to become national news because, again, it doesn't fit the narrative; didn't you know, Wall St paid back TARP!*
*Using some of the $17 trillion in low/no-interest loans from the Fed, which supposedly exists to keep unemployment low.
You could cut all funding for scientific research or 10% from Defense. In the former cause you would decimate the American university system, and the economy as a whole. In the latter case you might have to do without the Joint Strike Fighter (the total cost of which is ten times the entire research budget) or about four nuclear subs. In neither case would you even put a dent in overall spending. A bit more perspective: federal spending on research is equal to approximately %30 of the amount paid for interest on the National Debt.
Fighting over rounding errors in the budget like funding for research, the top income tax rate, education, etc. is simply another way to divert attention from Defense and Health and Human Services, which are by themselves larger than the economies of many countries.
There have been several times in the history of the USA where the overall tax rate was lowered, and tax revenues went up. This is because "the rich" moved money out of tax shelters and started investing it, which grew GNP. In other words, tax revenue went up because government was collecting a lower rate on a much larger amount of money. And "the rich" paid more taxes than they paid before.
Three examples from the late 20th century where tax-cuts lead to increased revenues: JFK, Reagan, and Clinton. However, on closer inspection, JFK cut taxes while closing loopholes, citing his own family as an example of how the wealthy evaded taxes. Rich people pulled their money out of tax shelters because that is exactly what JFK forced them to do by closing said loopholes. Reagan's tax cutting lead to a decrease in tax receipts, but they were coupled with deregulations of financial markets (and two subsequent tax increases) that increased revenues overall. This deregulation arguably lead to the creation of bubbles (e.g., Black Monday), which landed in the lap of Bush 1.0 and lead to him raising taxes. Clinton cut taxes as well, but focused them on the middle class, and again tax receipts were not the primary source of growth, it was the Dot Com Bubble, which arguably lead to the 2001 recession at the start of Bush 2.0. Speaking of Bush 2.0, he also cut taxes--dramatically--and passed on a huge deficit and a Carter-style recession to Obama.
I am not trying to argue with you, nor am I defending the policies of any administration, I just want to point out that the world is vastly more complicated than "cutting taxes increases revenues." Also, American presidents have developed a habit of increasing spending/cutting taxes and using creative accounting/deregulation to make themselves look good, and then passing an economic shit sandwich on to the next administration.
There are some people who view the above as a problem; this problem is called "the rich get richer". Even if the poor get richer also, which confuses me. How will you increase jobs without someone who is rich getting richer? And how does that rich person hurt the poor by getting richer?
If the rich get richer faster than the overall economy is growing, then the poor get poorer--either by direct loss or by incurring more debt. I refuse to use a pie analogy, but the economy is finite in size and when it shrinks, those whose wealth increases are by definition gaining at the expense of others. Reasonable People do not have a problem with "the rich getting richer;" they have a problem with the rich getting richer at the expense of the middle class. Again, not trying to pick a fight, just trying to contextualize your question.
Disclaimer: I don't even live in the US; I make my modest income in Euros in a country with a 50% income tax rate and a 20% sales tax.
For me it is my US Robots 9600 bps modem (the cool sysops had them too). I remember the arms race of modems, when I was so jealous of my friend's 300 bps modem that you put the handset of the telephone on to use, and my hands shaking with excitement when I opened the box that contained a brand-new, screaming-fast 2400 bps modem of my very own. But for some reason, it is that USR 9600 with the slick white plastic case of early 90's hardware and the array of LEDs blinking furiously while I carefully planned my next move in Trade Wars. I actually dug up the phone line between our house and the box at the street (we lived in the forrest, so that was a few hundred meters) and laid a new one in order to max out the subsequent 14.4 kpbs beauty. That and Commander Keen.
...Yesterday I was perplexed that my new Boxee Box only came with 2.4 GHz 802.11n and a 10/100 Ethernet adapter.