You see, this is one of those things that is completely and ridiculously false. The large mass of morons routinely changes the world, while a "small group of thoughtful committed citizens" can rarely have any affect whatsoever on the world. For every Ghandi, improving the world in some small way by their actions, there are a hundred American Souths, bringing misery and hell to hundreds of millions of people. And for every thoughtful group of comitted citizens, there are a dozen groups of comitted fascists, out to dominate the world and exterminate some other groups of people for whatever reason.
This little adage is one of those things that people only say because it sounds nice. It has absolutely no basis in reality.
Well, let's see: local government is full of people who are functionally indistinguishable from people in big government, except that they are either too pathetic to make it into big government, or are still working their way up.
Sure, the wretchedly tiny minority of genuinely good people in small government is slightly larger than the wretchedly tiny minority of genuinely good people in big government... but that's like saying that a vegan's feces will have more intact kernels of corn than those of a guy who eats nothing but steak. Either way, you have to go rooting through shit to find out, and neither is really any better than the other. There are easier ways to get corn.
And "individuals"? They are remarkably rare. Anyone who actually thinks about anything beyond who America's next top model will be, is in such a small and inconsequential group of people that nothing they do is capable of having any real impact on anything... other than to invent new technologies that can be used to make everyone more affluent and less free.
I know, it's hard to accept the reality of this: one of the most fascinating psychological phenomena discovered in the past decade is the fact that nearly all Human behaviour and social understanding is predicted on the assumption that we are in the majority. We assume that whatever we want, whatever we believe, whatever we choose, is what most everyone else will wants/believes/chooses. But if you actually stop to think about anything beyond the most superficial drivel, you have placed yourself in a tiny, tiny minority, and nothing about you or what you think or believe is even remotely representative of your society.
Hey, if you have something to hide, you shouldn't be leaving the house. At least until the government puts the sex-monitoring chip into your Illium (to prevent deviancy), and a few bone-conduction-microphones into your cervical vertebrae (to ensure you don't abuse free speech). Then you wont have anything to hide anyway, so what's the worry?
Seriously, privacy is basically impossible in the age of mass-media. Mass media makes it too easy to keep people so afraid that they'll sacrifice any right, any freedom, any sanctity, if the government will pretend to alleviate the imaginary threats. All that's required is the technology necessary to make taking that right/freedom/sanctity away feasible. Not even practical -- just feasible. Even cost is basically irrelevant, since the people are ultimately forced to pay those costs themselves.
Isn't that, like, considered to be some kind of a, you know, right, or some such thing? I don't really know the US constitution real well, but I seem to recall there being some mention of grieving addresses, or dressing-up griffons, or the abbess of Cleveland, something. Whatever, it's not like any of those dusty old scraps of paper mean anything.:p
Saying that judges are elected is virtually meaningless. Mussolini was elected too, over and over again. China and most of Iran's leaders are elected too. Elections don't really matter when there's only one candidate, or the requirement to be a candidate excludes all but a small group of people who are basically in cahoots already. They definitely don't matter when the ruling party gets to choose the candidates.
If someone were to present the evidence to the voters, would it matter? Who else would they vote for? Some other, identical judge, who'll just appoint the loser to some equally exalted position?
This doesn't judge apply to judges, communists, fascists, and theocratic puppets. It's a basic feature of cronyism, and cronyism is inescapable wherever charisma mattes more than merit.
Hey, there's an easy answer for that one. Put an RFID tag into every license plate (or into the tags, since those need to be replaced all the time anyway). Then put RFID scanners into every traffic light, every intersection, periodically in streetlights, etc. Anytime a car passes without a valid RFID-tagged license plate, the scanner automically signals the nearest police car, photographs the car, activates the vehicles "disable" code, detonates the land mines, deploys the hunter-killer bot, or whatever else the state feels is an appropriate response. And if the vehicle DOES have a valid RFID tag, then it's a simple matter to verify whether or not the owner has an approved license. It doesn't help much if the driver of the vehicle isn't the owner, but that's what the RFID tags that were jammed into everyone's skulls were for.
Seriously though -- RFID license plates and traffic light camera/RFID-scanner set-ups are basically a foregone conclusion at this point. They're inevitable.
I'm not saying that the redneck delusion has anything to do with reality. As much as I hate guns and gun-owners, the freedoom to own a gun is a reasonable form of liberty, just like any other.
My comment was referring to the fact that rednecks and conservatives babble incessantly about the importance of one particular constitutional right that has never been shown to have the slightest value to society in any way whatsoever, while considering the rest of them to be demonic liberal schemes to undermine society and encourage evils like sharing and doing unto others as you would have them to unto you, and stuff like that. Red-staters want the freedom to own guns and not pay taxes; every other form of freedom imaginable seems to deeply offend.
Realistically speaking, the first amendment makes the common (mis)interpretation of second amendment absolutely redundant. The first amendment guarantees, among other things, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That applies every bit as much to some backwoods yokel's desire to have a submachine-gun collection as it does to other peoples' desire to be openly homosexual, criticize the president for being a spoiled illiterate fuck-up, own pornography, operate websites calling for the Federal government to forcibly eject the southern states from the Union by signing a retroactive surrender for the Civil War, etc. Guns are almost as destructive and worthless as the people that own them, but the doesn't make the freedom to own them any less valid. They STILL pale in comparison to the destructive power of the automobile or the common dog; unless those are banned too, it's hard to make a good case for banning guns even in the name of public safety.
Hey, I'm convinced, I'd vote Cheney. What you've described would be the best presidency EVER! I mean, wow. If we're going to be stuck with horrible leaders, they can at least have infinite entertainment value.
Oh gee, Christians being grossly hypocritical! Who would have ever imagined?
Let's consider the people in question:
They believe in magic, in fairytales, in myths, in imaginary flying cloud men, and that by believing these ridiculous delusions, they are automatically good and moral people.
They fear change, and take pride in the fact that they oppose change of any kind. They consider the term "conservative" to be something other than one of the most profound character flaws imaginable.
They bitch and moan about social programs and taxes, while spending more public money than any US government has since World War 2 and paying for massive public works projects in OTHER COUNTRIES.
These people are completely loopy. They're delusional, deceptive, evil, and irrational. Referring to the GOP as "hypocrites" is like referring to a rabid llama as "hairy". They ARE hairy, but that's really just barely scratching the surface of what makes them the way that they are.
My favourite thing is when the manager changes jobs, and insists on lying about how much he was paying his employees. At my work, we are just about to get our third manager in a year (the fourth in two years, but I wasn't around for that). During both change-overs, the manager insisted that we quote a higher wage to the new manager than we were actually receiving; like, they felt we deserved more money, they weren't willing to pay it themselves, and were totally willing to dupe the new manager into paying us more. Madness.
People say that about EVERY form of power that isn't produced from fossil fuels. Nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, wind, blah blah blah. It's stupid bullshit from stupid people.
They ought to take a look at how much energy it takes to pump petroleum out of the ground, refine it, ship it from one place to another, and then turn what little is left into energy at less than 40% efficiency (closer to 15% on average if it's an automobile). I think the actual net efficiency works out to around 3% or 4%. So that's what other forms of power are competing against.
Seriously, someday people will have to learn to ignore the insane ramblings of rednecks who believe that "alternative power" is a euphemism for the government taking away their guns and forcing them be Wiccans while having to suffer the indignity of possessing civil liberties and human rights. There have been some issues with producing the semiconductors for solar panels in an environmentally responible way (the process has some toxic byproducts), but energy costs are not among them.
The best answer for them may not be the best answer for everyone. The best answer for everyone may leave these poor people screwed. That's a macrocosm problem--- how to solve everyone's problems?
Economically speaking, the poor should always be helped first, since even a small amount of assistance to them will be worth more than a large amount of assistance to the affluent. Plus, the poor vastly outnumber everyone else, so changes that help them go that much further.
They could choose to move to China and take all their techno-economic-social benefits with them.
Somehow, I doubt the utility companies are going to pack up their coal reactors and ship them to China. But there's always hope, right? Let the Chinese enjoy them for a while, until they smarten up; once 6% of their children are suffering from asthma, maybe we'll get to see some environmental justice, Communist style.
But most pollution is more ignorance of the consequences, which would require a very, very solid knowledge of biochemical interactions in order to predict.
Corporations are, legally speaking, people, right? So the same rules apply to them as to us, right? So if I invent some useful new solvent, would it be alright to pour it into the municipal reservoir? What if I just burn it outside my neighbour's window? Of course it's not alright -- I have to PROVE that it's safe before I deliberately expose people. Yet the chemicals that industries pump into the AIR (which we don't get a choice about breathing) are held to a LOWER standard than the chemicals that are put into prepackaged food (which we at least DO get a choice about eating). I just don't understand why you see a difference between me putting mercury in someone's sandwich to get rid of it (not to deliberately poison them -- they don't HAVE to eat the sandwich, and might not eat it anyway, right? I just need a cheap way to get rid of mercury. Sandwiches seem like a good place to dump it; they're absorbent, and they conveniently disappear everyday around noon), and industry putting mercury in the air to get rid of it. Someone is going to breathe that air sooner or later. It will get absorbed by plants, which will then have mercury in them when they're harvested for us to eat. It will get absorbed by plankton, which are then eaten by fish, which we then eat. And it's no different with any other chemical that gets dumped or burned. It all ends up in us, and they don't have the right. There is absolutely no difference between burning coal or dumping chemicals in a river, and me putting my fabulous new mystery solvent into cookies that I bake and then selling them to children. Coal emissions don't go through an LD-50 test before they're approved for release into the atmosphere. Neither do chemicals that get dumped in rivers.
And when we bugger it up, we lose economic competitiveness with other nations
You know what makes us lose economic competitiveness? Losing people to cancer, lung-disease, severe uncontrolled asthma and allergies, mental retardation, various forms of disability, etc. For example, there is strong evidence that autism is triggered by environmental toxins. Most of the money spent on special education for autistic children, on supporting parents who have to stop working to care for autistic children full-time, on supporting low-functioning autistic adults, it could all be saved. Health insurance rates could come way down, as would the cost of public health programs. Pay slightly more for power, pay less in taxes. I don't know, sounds pretty nice to me.
But they both mistook the human for a bird, and in attempting to shoot it one of them inadvertently killed a human. Neither intended to murder.
Many of the chemicals that are dumped are already known to be dangerous, and to accumulate in animals and plants. Industries KNOW that their pollutants are dangerous, and they
It's made ridiculously clear that these panels -- like applications of Titanium -- use TITANIUM DIOXIDE, which is just incredibly common, especially New Zealand and Australia. It's so cheap and common that it's put in toothpaste, not to mention an incredibly wide variety of other products.
Titanium ore is rare, yes. But what ore isn't? Try finding some aluminum ore sometime. The cost of simple FINDING aluminum ore is so obscenely high that no one bothers. Every shred of aluminum being used today comes from bauxite, or some other comparable clay. And these panels don't even need to be electrochemically separated like aluminum -- their metal needs don't even rival that of the humble tin can. It's just Titanium Dioxide, a major (and easily extracted) component of black sand.
Please, someone, mod this fucking retard down quickly. He didn't even read the article before embarassing himself with his ignorance.
To summarize the article: this has absolutely NOTHING to do with silicon. The Titanium dioxide doesn't require refining, any more than the titanium dioxide in your fucking toothpaste requires refining. The technology is based on using porphyrin rings -- an easily synthesized class of organic molecules. You might have heard of two of them -- chlorophyll and hemoglobin. It's a "dye", not a "die". No semiconductors involved. TiO_2 and porphyrin dyes. 10% of the price, 50% of the efficiency: 5 times better, at least according to the article.
There is an entire world full of rooftops going to waste. All that is required to turn them into power is for solar panels to become more affordable. Hopefully, this technology provides a candidate for bringing those prices way down.
To review: you are a retard. Please READ THE DAMN ARTICLES in the future. Not that you will, of course, since that would be inconsistent with being a retard. But at least consider it, for the sake of your precariously low intelligence.
It's a terrible system, but I think the the alternatives are worse.
Ask someone who lives in a cancer cluster if they think that there are worse alternatives.
Is it, or is it not, a crime to fire a gun in public? You don't have to deliberately point it at people to be guilty of a very serious crime. Likewise, Mercury is a deadly poison, as are many other chemicals. We're not talking about industry just MAKING deadly chemicals -- we're talking about industry deliberately dumping those chemicals into the atmosphere or into rivers. They COULD process those emissions, they COULD process their toxic waste. They CHOOSE not to, they CHOOSE to dump it into rivers, they CHOOSE to pump it up a smokestack without any filtration.
Playing semantics about causation is pedantic and just avoids the real issue. Guns don't kill people, bullets don't kill people, even pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger wont kill them. Extensive blood-loss kills them, just like systemic organ failure (from cancer, from environmental contaminants), starvation (from famine, from climate change), asphyxiation (from drowing, from floods), poverty (from property-loss, from those same floods), etc. The chains of effect can be more than a few steps long, and don't always involve getting up close and personal with the murderer. It's just easier to feel all angry about immediate, physical effects, because you're too goddam stupid to think beyond your monkey instincts, and can't accept the criminality of anything that doesn't trigger an emotional gut response.
But, if you're more comfortable letting corporations kill people, comfort yourself with the knowledge that it's no different than letting someone with HIV go around infecting other people -- after all the virus wont actually be what kills them, and he doesn't INTEND for his victim to get sick and die. You can go and join one of those groups that defends people with HIV+ who go to the bath-houses and to orgies, spreading the virus as far and wide as they can.
Let's review:
Specific pollution, and not other factors, was the cause of the death.
This, of course, is irrelevant. If you poison someone, you go to jail. It doesn't even matter if they die -- attempted poisoning is just as bad. If I put mercury in your coffee at work, just because it happens to seem like a convenient way to dispose of some extra mercury, I go to jail, regardless of whether you even get sick.
The specific pollution causing the death came from a specific person (i.e. a corporation).
If everyone in the office puts a little bit of mercury in your coffee, we ALL go to jail, because we're ALL poisoning you deliberately.
That specific person did or should have predicted that death would arise from that pollution.
Everyone over the age of 5 knows that mercury is poisonous, that lead is poisonous, that CO_2 is a greenhouse gas, that deforestation causes floods, etc. Industrial corporations are double aware, since they have chemists or engineers working for them, and they almost certainly have helpful environmentalists and protesters letting them know on a regular basis. Nothing shows up a plea of ignorance like thousands and thousands of people who ALL "told you so".
No other defense exists to the negligence which caused the death (such as accident, inadvertence, mistake, reasonable reliance on sound information).
"I didn't know know mercury was poisonous! I thought that the mercury was magically disappearing once it was in the coffee! It was an accident, it just fell in there and I was too embarassed to say anything. Jenny from accounting said that mercury actually makes coffee healthier!" That'll go over well. The judge will still be laughing while he signs the conviction.
Don't be inane. The constitution grants every American the right to life. Pollution robs people of life, and is therefore a violation of a constitutionally guaranteed right. The federal government exists to enforce the constitution. Thefore the federal government has the right to stop industry from poisoning people to death, from violating people's constitutionally guaranteed right to life. No lawsuits are supposed to be required, anymore than lawsuits are required to prevent your neighbour from bursting into your house and putting three rounds of buckshot into your chest. The government will try to deal with the guy that goes around raping and murdering children; you don't have to sue that pedophile, it's just not a necessary step in the process.
Murder is illegal and unconstitutional, no matter profitable it happens to be. Whether it's dumping mercury into the air and water, causing floods and landslides by clear-cutting, or deliberately inducing catastrophic planet-wide climate change, no one has the right to commit murder.
In a socialist society, that may be true. But in our society, you have to work or you die. And you go around quitting jobs, sooner or later you'll be unemployed and no one will hire you. The reasons why you quit are totally irrelevant -- even standing up for your basic constitutional rights is enough to render yourself permanently unemployable. Skilled, hard-working people end up destitute and homeless all the time.
Without a welfare system extensive enough to make employment optional, people have a right to their job, because that job is the only thing enabling them to enjoy the right to LIVE. No job, no life. The right to life implies the right to a job. It's that or socialism -- take your pick. Frankly, workers' rights seems a lot more plausible at this point in history.
Star Wars DID have a huge, super loyal fanbase. The prequels, not to mention the ravages of middle-age and decades of micromanaging the height of grass, hit that fanbase quite hard. It's unsurprising that other franchises are starting to encroach on Lucas's turf.
How long did it take to go from "Star Wars", the movie that reviewers assumed would flop, to "Star Wars", source of the Jedi religion? "Serenity" has inspired a subculture of people who identify as "Brown Coats" in just a fraction of that time. You shouldn't underestimate the impact of the series. It may not have approached the level of fame and merchandising that "Star Wars" has, but it's still a pretty serious subcultural phenomenon. (Oh, and more people already talk about "Serenity" than "Planet of the Apes", which was pretty much destroyed by shoddy sequels and remakes).
Problem is, the insatiably curious people go into science or engineering or something like that. Teaching gives very few opportunities to satisfy one's curiosity -- at least in a professional capacity. I'm not making any claims about what teachers do in their spare time. And that's certainly not to badmouth teachers either; teachers who love what they do and teach with passion do more good in the world than almost anyone else in the world. But because teaching focuses on what's already known, the best it can hope to accomplish is to encourage the students who are already deeply curious by tantalizing them with hints at the fabulous depth of Human knowledge.
Well, let's see: the US could have... NOT supported religious fundamentalists. They could have used OTHER proxies. Somehow during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the US managed to give money to groups that DON'T murder women who dare to not wear a veil in public, or who are caught flirting with men without their father's permission. I mean, call me crazy, but I'd say those people are significantly worse than Communists. I mean, Communist Afghanistan versus Honour-Killing America-Attacking Afghanistan? I'll take the commies, thanks. But it illustrates again how irrational Americans are. Most of those South American communist states had nothing to do with the USSR (Cuba isn't South American, incidentally). The US just messed with them because Americans don't respect the freedom of other societies to make their own decisions about how to run their economies. Americans got totally wrapped in yet another one of their little paranoid fantasies about enemies lurking in every shadow that they decided that freedom and democracy had no worth next to making sure that everyone on Earth had to pay full price for things.
The CBC definitely represents the right way for a government to stimulate the arts. The CRTC represents the wrong way. The CBC actually produces some great programs, and broadcasts some awesome music. "Brave New Waves" anyone? That show was one of the best things to ever grace the radiowaves.
Believe me, we wouldn't miss Alberta. A few million close-minded religious zealots who distrust the world's best scientists in favour of belief in imaginary fairytale men? They would fit in just perfectly with the US. Of course, by the time they notice that Americans have significantly less personal freedom than Canadians and are, for the most part, significantly less affluent, they'd be stuck. But stupid people have always allowed themselves to be duped by a small wealthy elite, and since those elite are the only ones who would benefit from being a part of the US, it's only natural that idiots all want it too.
Of course, unless you're jobless and homeless, you could ALREADY move to the US. Why haven't you? The lack of worthwhile jobs? The total lack of any social support systems (despite tax rates that are only marginally lower)? The invasive government spying, interference in the economy, or the fact that the US government allows corporations to violate peoples rights freely? I mean, none of that matters as long as you can see "Friends" four times a day instead of just three.
Incidentally, no one -- including the government -- gives a shit if you believe in global warming or the Kyoto protocol. But that doesn't mean you get to ruin the world for the rest of us. By analogy, I don't believe that murdering stupid people is wrong -- but that doesn't mean I'm allowed to go around killing small-minded backwater hicks. Our beliefs don't entitle us to harm other people. And no supporting the Kyoto protocol will ultimately result in mass starvation and displacement, extreme droughts and floods in various parts of the world, and numerous wars over basic resources. Sorry, but your undereducated little subculture's desire to see slightly higher profits doesn't outweigh the lives of the millions that will suffer without emissions controls.
Not really. I don't have a gun or an SUV, I like being able to buy Cuban goods, I don't hold intellectuals in contempt, I don't watch reality television, I hate religion, I have difficulty pretending that certain portions of history didn't happen, and I refuse to vote for a Fascist political party just to ensure that some other Fascist political party doesn't win. Conversely, I like having socialized healthcare, I like not having to support a bunch murderers (AKA: the troops), I like having a low mercury content in the air and water, I like having history books that don't mysteriously omit the Vietnam war or the Bay of Pigs, and I like having a relatively low chance of being murdered. I wouldn't fit in very well at all in America at all.
Well, the government support of big media is definitely its own problem. When you look at the pissing matches between California and BC over how heavily they can subsidize film production, or the lobbying that goes on to strip the public of basic free speech rights (let alone the fair-use rights), it becomes pretty obvious that at some point, big media needs to be collapse and allow a refocusing on small scale artistic expression. The factors that led to the existence of big media are disappearing anyway; digital technology renders irrelevant movie theaters, record stores, video rental stores, cable networks, etc. Just replace broadcast television with Youtube, and it's all good. Art has always made more sense as either a patronage-system, individual labours of love, or an added-value component to some other business (like music in playing in bars, during advertisements, etc).
Why do they always have to embarass us like this? The great thing about youtube is that all the media is in direct competition. It's exactly the arena where Canadian content should shine -- any of it that is worth seeing in the first place, that is. It's not like with television where networks can be deliberately myopic about only selecting programs that will appeal to American demographics. The very nature of youtube makes nationality irrelevant. Canadians can access all of the Canadian content on youtube just as easily as they can access the American, Russian, or Swahili content.
If Canadian broadcasters want Canadians to see Canadian content on youtube, they should put some awesome videos on youtube and then promote them to people. THAT'S how you encourage the development and advancement of culture. By making things that kick ass and then spreading them far and wide, not by keeping out things that happen to kick asses of the wrong nationality. Maybe if they'd get past their intense penis-envy towards American-style copyright law, they would see that.
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This little adage is one of those things that people only say because it sounds nice. It has absolutely no basis in reality.
Sure, the wretchedly tiny minority of genuinely good people in small government is slightly larger than the wretchedly tiny minority of genuinely good people in big government ... but that's like saying that a vegan's feces will have more intact kernels of corn than those of a guy who eats nothing but steak. Either way, you have to go rooting through shit to find out, and neither is really any better than the other. There are easier ways to get corn.
And "individuals"? They are remarkably rare. Anyone who actually thinks about anything beyond who America's next top model will be, is in such a small and inconsequential group of people that nothing they do is capable of having any real impact on anything ... other than to invent new technologies that can be used to make everyone more affluent and less free.
I know, it's hard to accept the reality of this: one of the most fascinating psychological phenomena discovered in the past decade is the fact that nearly all Human behaviour and social understanding is predicted on the assumption that we are in the majority. We assume that whatever we want, whatever we believe, whatever we choose, is what most everyone else will wants/believes/chooses. But if you actually stop to think about anything beyond the most superficial drivel, you have placed yourself in a tiny, tiny minority, and nothing about you or what you think or believe is even remotely representative of your society.
Seriously, privacy is basically impossible in the age of mass-media. Mass media makes it too easy to keep people so afraid that they'll sacrifice any right, any freedom, any sanctity, if the government will pretend to alleviate the imaginary threats. All that's required is the technology necessary to make taking that right/freedom/sanctity away feasible. Not even practical -- just feasible. Even cost is basically irrelevant, since the people are ultimately forced to pay those costs themselves.
Isn't that, like, considered to be some kind of a, you know, right, or some such thing? I don't really know the US constitution real well, but I seem to recall there being some mention of grieving addresses, or dressing-up griffons, or the abbess of Cleveland, something. Whatever, it's not like any of those dusty old scraps of paper mean anything. :p
If someone were to present the evidence to the voters, would it matter? Who else would they vote for? Some other, identical judge, who'll just appoint the loser to some equally exalted position?
This doesn't judge apply to judges, communists, fascists, and theocratic puppets. It's a basic feature of cronyism, and cronyism is inescapable wherever charisma mattes more than merit.
Hey, there's an easy answer for that one. Put an RFID tag into every license plate (or into the tags, since those need to be replaced all the time anyway). Then put RFID scanners into every traffic light, every intersection, periodically in streetlights, etc. Anytime a car passes without a valid RFID-tagged license plate, the scanner automically signals the nearest police car, photographs the car, activates the vehicles "disable" code, detonates the land mines, deploys the hunter-killer bot, or whatever else the state feels is an appropriate response. And if the vehicle DOES have a valid RFID tag, then it's a simple matter to verify whether or not the owner has an approved license. It doesn't help much if the driver of the vehicle isn't the owner, but that's what the RFID tags that were jammed into everyone's skulls were for. Seriously though -- RFID license plates and traffic light camera/RFID-scanner set-ups are basically a foregone conclusion at this point. They're inevitable.
My comment was referring to the fact that rednecks and conservatives babble incessantly about the importance of one particular constitutional right that has never been shown to have the slightest value to society in any way whatsoever, while considering the rest of them to be demonic liberal schemes to undermine society and encourage evils like sharing and doing unto others as you would have them to unto you, and stuff like that. Red-staters want the freedom to own guns and not pay taxes; every other form of freedom imaginable seems to deeply offend.
Realistically speaking, the first amendment makes the common (mis)interpretation of second amendment absolutely redundant. The first amendment guarantees, among other things, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That applies every bit as much to some backwoods yokel's desire to have a submachine-gun collection as it does to other peoples' desire to be openly homosexual, criticize the president for being a spoiled illiterate fuck-up, own pornography, operate websites calling for the Federal government to forcibly eject the southern states from the Union by signing a retroactive surrender for the Civil War, etc. Guns are almost as destructive and worthless as the people that own them, but the doesn't make the freedom to own them any less valid. They STILL pale in comparison to the destructive power of the automobile or the common dog; unless those are banned too, it's hard to make a good case for banning guns even in the name of public safety.
Hey, I'm convinced, I'd vote Cheney. What you've described would be the best presidency EVER! I mean, wow. If we're going to be stuck with horrible leaders, they can at least have infinite entertainment value.
Let's consider the people in question:
These people are completely loopy. They're delusional, deceptive, evil, and irrational. Referring to the GOP as "hypocrites" is like referring to a rabid llama as "hairy". They ARE hairy, but that's really just barely scratching the surface of what makes them the way that they are.
My favourite thing is when the manager changes jobs, and insists on lying about how much he was paying his employees. At my work, we are just about to get our third manager in a year (the fourth in two years, but I wasn't around for that). During both change-overs, the manager insisted that we quote a higher wage to the new manager than we were actually receiving; like, they felt we deserved more money, they weren't willing to pay it themselves, and were totally willing to dupe the new manager into paying us more. Madness.
They ought to take a look at how much energy it takes to pump petroleum out of the ground, refine it, ship it from one place to another, and then turn what little is left into energy at less than 40% efficiency (closer to 15% on average if it's an automobile). I think the actual net efficiency works out to around 3% or 4%. So that's what other forms of power are competing against.
Seriously, someday people will have to learn to ignore the insane ramblings of rednecks who believe that "alternative power" is a euphemism for the government taking away their guns and forcing them be Wiccans while having to suffer the indignity of possessing civil liberties and human rights. There have been some issues with producing the semiconductors for solar panels in an environmentally responible way (the process has some toxic byproducts), but energy costs are not among them.
Economically speaking, the poor should always be helped first, since even a small amount of assistance to them will be worth more than a large amount of assistance to the affluent. Plus, the poor vastly outnumber everyone else, so changes that help them go that much further.
Somehow, I doubt the utility companies are going to pack up their coal reactors and ship them to China. But there's always hope, right? Let the Chinese enjoy them for a while, until they smarten up; once 6% of their children are suffering from asthma, maybe we'll get to see some environmental justice, Communist style.
Corporations are, legally speaking, people, right? So the same rules apply to them as to us, right? So if I invent some useful new solvent, would it be alright to pour it into the municipal reservoir? What if I just burn it outside my neighbour's window? Of course it's not alright -- I have to PROVE that it's safe before I deliberately expose people. Yet the chemicals that industries pump into the AIR (which we don't get a choice about breathing) are held to a LOWER standard than the chemicals that are put into prepackaged food (which we at least DO get a choice about eating). I just don't understand why you see a difference between me putting mercury in someone's sandwich to get rid of it (not to deliberately poison them -- they don't HAVE to eat the sandwich, and might not eat it anyway, right? I just need a cheap way to get rid of mercury. Sandwiches seem like a good place to dump it; they're absorbent, and they conveniently disappear everyday around noon), and industry putting mercury in the air to get rid of it. Someone is going to breathe that air sooner or later. It will get absorbed by plants, which will then have mercury in them when they're harvested for us to eat. It will get absorbed by plankton, which are then eaten by fish, which we then eat. And it's no different with any other chemical that gets dumped or burned. It all ends up in us, and they don't have the right. There is absolutely no difference between burning coal or dumping chemicals in a river, and me putting my fabulous new mystery solvent into cookies that I bake and then selling them to children. Coal emissions don't go through an LD-50 test before they're approved for release into the atmosphere. Neither do chemicals that get dumped in rivers.
You know what makes us lose economic competitiveness? Losing people to cancer, lung-disease, severe uncontrolled asthma and allergies, mental retardation, various forms of disability, etc. For example, there is strong evidence that autism is triggered by environmental toxins. Most of the money spent on special education for autistic children, on supporting parents who have to stop working to care for autistic children full-time, on supporting low-functioning autistic adults, it could all be saved. Health insurance rates could come way down, as would the cost of public health programs. Pay slightly more for power, pay less in taxes. I don't know, sounds pretty nice to me.
Many of the chemicals that are dumped are already known to be dangerous, and to accumulate in animals and plants. Industries KNOW that their pollutants are dangerous, and they
It's made ridiculously clear that these panels -- like applications of Titanium -- use TITANIUM DIOXIDE, which is just incredibly common, especially New Zealand and Australia. It's so cheap and common that it's put in toothpaste, not to mention an incredibly wide variety of other products.
Titanium ore is rare, yes. But what ore isn't? Try finding some aluminum ore sometime. The cost of simple FINDING aluminum ore is so obscenely high that no one bothers. Every shred of aluminum being used today comes from bauxite, or some other comparable clay. And these panels don't even need to be electrochemically separated like aluminum -- their metal needs don't even rival that of the humble tin can. It's just Titanium Dioxide, a major (and easily extracted) component of black sand.
To summarize the article: this has absolutely NOTHING to do with silicon. The Titanium dioxide doesn't require refining, any more than the titanium dioxide in your fucking toothpaste requires refining. The technology is based on using porphyrin rings -- an easily synthesized class of organic molecules. You might have heard of two of them -- chlorophyll and hemoglobin. It's a "dye", not a "die". No semiconductors involved. TiO_2 and porphyrin dyes. 10% of the price, 50% of the efficiency: 5 times better, at least according to the article.
There is an entire world full of rooftops going to waste. All that is required to turn them into power is for solar panels to become more affordable. Hopefully, this technology provides a candidate for bringing those prices way down.
To review: you are a retard. Please READ THE DAMN ARTICLES in the future. Not that you will, of course, since that would be inconsistent with being a retard. But at least consider it, for the sake of your precariously low intelligence.
Ask someone who lives in a cancer cluster if they think that there are worse alternatives.
Is it, or is it not, a crime to fire a gun in public? You don't have to deliberately point it at people to be guilty of a very serious crime. Likewise, Mercury is a deadly poison, as are many other chemicals. We're not talking about industry just MAKING deadly chemicals -- we're talking about industry deliberately dumping those chemicals into the atmosphere or into rivers. They COULD process those emissions, they COULD process their toxic waste. They CHOOSE not to, they CHOOSE to dump it into rivers, they CHOOSE to pump it up a smokestack without any filtration.
Playing semantics about causation is pedantic and just avoids the real issue. Guns don't kill people, bullets don't kill people, even pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger wont kill them. Extensive blood-loss kills them, just like systemic organ failure (from cancer, from environmental contaminants), starvation (from famine, from climate change), asphyxiation (from drowing, from floods), poverty (from property-loss, from those same floods), etc. The chains of effect can be more than a few steps long, and don't always involve getting up close and personal with the murderer. It's just easier to feel all angry about immediate, physical effects, because you're too goddam stupid to think beyond your monkey instincts, and can't accept the criminality of anything that doesn't trigger an emotional gut response.
But, if you're more comfortable letting corporations kill people, comfort yourself with the knowledge that it's no different than letting someone with HIV go around infecting other people -- after all the virus wont actually be what kills them, and he doesn't INTEND for his victim to get sick and die. You can go and join one of those groups that defends people with HIV+ who go to the bath-houses and to orgies, spreading the virus as far and wide as they can.
Let's review:
This, of course, is irrelevant. If you poison someone, you go to jail. It doesn't even matter if they die -- attempted poisoning is just as bad. If I put mercury in your coffee at work, just because it happens to seem like a convenient way to dispose of some extra mercury, I go to jail, regardless of whether you even get sick.
If everyone in the office puts a little bit of mercury in your coffee, we ALL go to jail, because we're ALL poisoning you deliberately.
Everyone over the age of 5 knows that mercury is poisonous, that lead is poisonous, that CO_2 is a greenhouse gas, that deforestation causes floods, etc. Industrial corporations are double aware, since they have chemists or engineers working for them, and they almost certainly have helpful environmentalists and protesters letting them know on a regular basis. Nothing shows up a plea of ignorance like thousands and thousands of people who ALL "told you so".
"I didn't know know mercury was poisonous! I thought that the mercury was magically disappearing once it was in the coffee! It was an accident, it just fell in there and I was too embarassed to say anything. Jenny from accounting said that mercury actually makes coffee healthier!" That'll go over well. The judge will still be laughing while he signs the conviction.
Murder is illegal and unconstitutional, no matter profitable it happens to be. Whether it's dumping mercury into the air and water, causing floods and landslides by clear-cutting, or deliberately inducing catastrophic planet-wide climate change, no one has the right to commit murder.
Without a welfare system extensive enough to make employment optional, people have a right to their job, because that job is the only thing enabling them to enjoy the right to LIVE. No job, no life. The right to life implies the right to a job. It's that or socialism -- take your pick. Frankly, workers' rights seems a lot more plausible at this point in history.
How long did it take to go from "Star Wars", the movie that reviewers assumed would flop, to "Star Wars", source of the Jedi religion? "Serenity" has inspired a subculture of people who identify as "Brown Coats" in just a fraction of that time. You shouldn't underestimate the impact of the series. It may not have approached the level of fame and merchandising that "Star Wars" has, but it's still a pretty serious subcultural phenomenon. (Oh, and more people already talk about "Serenity" than "Planet of the Apes", which was pretty much destroyed by shoddy sequels and remakes).
Problem is, the insatiably curious people go into science or engineering or something like that. Teaching gives very few opportunities to satisfy one's curiosity -- at least in a professional capacity. I'm not making any claims about what teachers do in their spare time. And that's certainly not to badmouth teachers either; teachers who love what they do and teach with passion do more good in the world than almost anyone else in the world. But because teaching focuses on what's already known, the best it can hope to accomplish is to encourage the students who are already deeply curious by tantalizing them with hints at the fabulous depth of Human knowledge.
Well, let's see: the US could have ... NOT supported religious fundamentalists. They could have used OTHER proxies. Somehow during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, the US managed to give money to groups that DON'T murder women who dare to not wear a veil in public, or who are caught flirting with men without their father's permission. I mean, call me crazy, but I'd say those people are significantly worse than Communists. I mean, Communist Afghanistan versus Honour-Killing America-Attacking Afghanistan? I'll take the commies, thanks. But it illustrates again how irrational Americans are. Most of those South American communist states had nothing to do with the USSR (Cuba isn't South American, incidentally). The US just messed with them because Americans don't respect the freedom of other societies to make their own decisions about how to run their economies. Americans got totally wrapped in yet another one of their little paranoid fantasies about enemies lurking in every shadow that they decided that freedom and democracy had no worth next to making sure that everyone on Earth had to pay full price for things.
The CBC definitely represents the right way for a government to stimulate the arts. The CRTC represents the wrong way. The CBC actually produces some great programs, and broadcasts some awesome music. "Brave New Waves" anyone? That show was one of the best things to ever grace the radiowaves.
Of course, unless you're jobless and homeless, you could ALREADY move to the US. Why haven't you? The lack of worthwhile jobs? The total lack of any social support systems (despite tax rates that are only marginally lower)? The invasive government spying, interference in the economy, or the fact that the US government allows corporations to violate peoples rights freely? I mean, none of that matters as long as you can see "Friends" four times a day instead of just three.
Incidentally, no one -- including the government -- gives a shit if you believe in global warming or the Kyoto protocol. But that doesn't mean you get to ruin the world for the rest of us. By analogy, I don't believe that murdering stupid people is wrong -- but that doesn't mean I'm allowed to go around killing small-minded backwater hicks. Our beliefs don't entitle us to harm other people. And no supporting the Kyoto protocol will ultimately result in mass starvation and displacement, extreme droughts and floods in various parts of the world, and numerous wars over basic resources. Sorry, but your undereducated little subculture's desire to see slightly higher profits doesn't outweigh the lives of the millions that will suffer without emissions controls.
Not really. I don't have a gun or an SUV, I like being able to buy Cuban goods, I don't hold intellectuals in contempt, I don't watch reality television, I hate religion, I have difficulty pretending that certain portions of history didn't happen, and I refuse to vote for a Fascist political party just to ensure that some other Fascist political party doesn't win. Conversely, I like having socialized healthcare, I like not having to support a bunch murderers (AKA: the troops), I like having a low mercury content in the air and water, I like having history books that don't mysteriously omit the Vietnam war or the Bay of Pigs, and I like having a relatively low chance of being murdered. I wouldn't fit in very well at all in America at all.
Well, the government support of big media is definitely its own problem. When you look at the pissing matches between California and BC over how heavily they can subsidize film production, or the lobbying that goes on to strip the public of basic free speech rights (let alone the fair-use rights), it becomes pretty obvious that at some point, big media needs to be collapse and allow a refocusing on small scale artistic expression. The factors that led to the existence of big media are disappearing anyway; digital technology renders irrelevant movie theaters, record stores, video rental stores, cable networks, etc. Just replace broadcast television with Youtube, and it's all good. Art has always made more sense as either a patronage-system, individual labours of love, or an added-value component to some other business (like music in playing in bars, during advertisements, etc).
If Canadian broadcasters want Canadians to see Canadian content on youtube, they should put some awesome videos on youtube and then promote them to people. THAT'S how you encourage the development and advancement of culture. By making things that kick ass and then spreading them far and wide, not by keeping out things that happen to kick asses of the wrong nationality. Maybe if they'd get past their intense penis-envy towards American-style copyright law, they would see that.