I don't have faith in the free-market: faith is the belief in something without reason, or despite reason.
I'm gonna venture a guess and say you hate religion so much you feel the word "faith" has a dirty connotation which you don't like being associated with yourself. If this is the case, you're either unfamiliar with more general usage of the word "faith" or you're being overly defensive (personally I assume it's the former).
Either way, it's entirely your own error. The word faith can be used interchangeably with words like trust or belief. Trust, belief, and faith, can exist in the presence of supporting evidence. For example: "I believe the theory of blahblahblah is correct in the presence of this evidence here". Do note that this (hypothetical) evidence would not necessarily proof of the theory, so you can't say it is absolutely known with certainty to be true, so the applicability of faith isn't excluded.
(That said, I have to say I don't see this evidence you referred to. Please cite me a country who's economy is more laissez-faire yet also enjoys superior consumer safety & quality compared to us).
I agree that the government should work to protect the individual - but I disagree that having an FDA (or many of the myriad alphabet agencies), actually do that. In essence because what these agencies do is substitute their will for the will of the market participants.
Game theory says that the free market economics could arguably work, but only in scenarios with perfect (or near perfect) information among all players. Making fake medical journals kinda highlights the fact that they're not willing to allow such an ideal market to exist. Why? It's not in their interest to do so, so they don't. Common sense right?
I'm okay with somebody in a government agency substituting their will for my own if they possess superior knowledge concerning how to go about testing for what I could consider to be harmful to my interests. Given what is poisonous to Ben is likely also poisonous to Jerry, it's not unreasonable to say that government screening of toxic materials in food is universally in everyone's interests. If they know how to test for this crap, let them. They'll be better at the lab work than I would be. (not to mention, I don't have the time to test for toxins in all my food before I eat it).
So even if companies could create better mechanisms for quality control, they are mandated (at the point of a gun) to follow the bureaucrats' whims.
Nothing in the law forces companies to practice less-safe or less-healthy policies than they wish. Nobody is forcing Monsanto to genetically engineer anything that contaminates non GMO crops. If companies in a free market are able to produce safer food/drugs when big brother isn't looking over their shoulder, why don't they do it now? Specifically, give me an example of how the FDA would prevent a food producer from selling me cleaner food than what they currently sell me.
In a free-market, reputation must be earned, and can easily be lost. Also in a free-market, harm or fraud is a crime (protection from criminals is a legitimate function of the government.
I'll take the results of a regular lab-tests over someone's "reputation" any day. Regulators' tests can also can be used to establish certainty something is safe before harm occurs. This is valuable because preventing damage is always cheaper, easier, and more effective than trying to remediate it after it's been allowed to occur.
In Capitalism, your "nice cool glass of melamine laced milk" would land you a "nice long stay in the penitentiary". See? No FDA required.
Come on, seriously. Why did Apple make the iPhone, when it could have made a junky piece plastic that falls apart when you touch it? I'll tell you why - because in a free market, the spoils go to those who give people what they want and need. Which is exactly why you would not see some kind of persistent "unsanitary meat" problem in a free-market.
You've found one high quality product or service you like and you're attempting to use it as proof that all products/services are good and high quality. The problem is that, besides this being an obvious logical fallacy, we know from simple experience there are bad products and bad services.
Please don't tell me you are referring to the work of the hack-novelist-pretending-to-be-historian Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a fiction writer with an agenda to smear hard-working industrialists by pretending to give an historical account and passing it off as "fact".
I have a family member who works in the FDA, and I've heard stories about "don't eat this", or "don't eat that" due to what they've historically found them guilty of. People nowadays DO still try to scam the market with unsanitary food. It occurs on a daily basis. Without the FDA, you'd end up eating quite a bit of this stuff.
I get it. You believe and have faith in the free-market system and this gives you incentive to criticize anything that challenges your free-market dogmas. But meanwhile in the real world, people are trying to feed you poisonous crap, and will do so unless government intervenes. Wishing otherwise doesn't make it so.
If you don't believe that your food's quality would drop the day they deregulate the food industry, I've got a nice cool glass of melamine laced milk to show you...
There's not some super-secret version of the Bible that you only get to look at after 15 years of faithful service and huge stacks of cash donations to the Vatican.
How do you know that?
It's known, for instance, that the Church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas. The only remaining full copy that we know of was found at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. It escaped the purge by virtue of being hidden for 1800 years or so.
If the Scientologists are ultimately successful in suppressing Operation Clambake and similar efforts, it's conceivable that the full text of LRH's teachings will similarly disappear from history, to be replaced in the public consciousness with a less controversial, Church-sanitized version.
Back in the year 325, you could get away with burning scrolls to censor heretical texts.
But nowadays we have something called the Internet. Good luck erasing *anything* that's remotely interesting about a controversial multi-national religious cult.
We already tried the libertarian style economics. Crack open a history book and read about why government started regulating things. It invites itself to stock manipulation, trust schemes, unsanitary products, child labor and hazardous working conditions. No single social construct should be responsible for everything, not government, nor corporations. The goal should be balance.
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail. This is actually a good thing, as it weeds out (most of) the idiots, making room for others with better ideas to flourish.
Sure, let them fail. In the meantime, the products or services they provided will become unavailable to consumers while we wait for new companies with less experience. That experience usually helps make whatever they produce more efficient than what the startup company which would try to replace them would do. A high corporate-death/corporate-birth turnover rate would make for a painfully unstable economy.
"Free markets must convince you to voluntarily consume their products instead of a competitor's."
When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack. You will have to buy somebody's cheaply produced yet unsanitary meat because it's the only thing available on the market. It's not like this hasn't happened before.
I'd love to hear how a free-market fundamentalist would justify deregulating something like, say, an airline industry, and simply let them decide what is and isn't safe in terms of airline maintenance. The only way for consumers to abandon something like an unsafe airline would be for people to first start dying (otherwise how would you know it wasn't safe?).
Government can have proactively improve the quality & safety of products and services whereas consumers in a purely free-market airline industry can't always do the same. Free-market consumer decisions are almost always reactive, occurring after somebody has suffered damages or purchased damaged goods. There is no incentive in free-market economics to do anything beyond what you must in order to make a buck. Government (who's sole motive isn't greed for money, but rather fear of being elected out of office) serves as a good check against a company, who's sole responsibility is to make a profit for whomever owns the company. Lust for power checks lust for money. Not perfect, but better than no check at all.
Free-market economics have had failures throughout history. Not just in terms of corporate-failures, but in terms of public health, public safety, and quality of life. Ignore history at your own peril.
Turned tail? What makes you think America stopped going out of cowardice? You can only collect so many moon-rocks before people start to ask the question of whether or not it's worth the billions of dollars it costs to keep going.
Btw, "China" and "better technology"? I'm gonna have to call [citation needed] on that one. If I didn't already know you were trying to be serious, that would be interpreted as a funny joke. China doesn't compare to most developed nations in terms of innovation. Especially in terms of quality of technology. Their idea of "innovation" is making cheap rip-offs of what others have designed.
Uh, hopefully this isn't news or anything, but well, we already won that race. Several decades ago. When the available technology was crappier. In fact, we went more than once, so we've lapped them multiple times.
Frankly, I think NASA's better off moving on to one of the next two big space-race checkpoints: 1) Mars (I'm sorta "meh" about that one). 2) Find a way to clean up all of our orbital debris. (While not glamorous, this is going to be a prerequisite for us becoming a space-faring species).
Do not confuse tree-huggers with environmentalists or environmental scientists.
Nuclear is considered "green" by many simply because it's the lesser of two evils (compared to coal). It produces half as much CO2 (the reason it produces any is due to ore refinement). In reality, there's more ambient radiation surrounding coal plants than nuclear plants.
Regarding wind: Any bird that is clipped by a windmill is as good as dead, the tips of those sucks spin much faster than they appear, but ultimately, windmills didn't even come close the killing as many birds as windows do. For an endangered species of bird, I can see someone arguing against a wind farm in a specific flyway, but otherwise it seems silly to me.
Hydro: Moot. We've already put a dam in every place that we could think. I doubt anyone will be tearing any dams down for any reasons.
Solar: That is a strawman. No serious parties are claiming solar should be regarded as an undesirable option.
But, what's really insidious about the "global warming" crowd is that they got people to think about carbon dioxide (CO2) as a polluting gas. CO2 is not pollution. Sure, you can get CO2 poisoning, but then, you can also die from eating too much salt or sugar (or water on the flip side). CO2 per se is not toxic, it's not "pollution". You breathe it out, and plants need them for photosynthesis.
Fact: The term "Pollutants" normally includes any material which is significantly detrimental to an environmental system. The EPA's job isn't just to protect human health, but to protect environmental systems as well.
Dumping sufficiently concentrated salt water wherever you please can easily be illegal, such as brine waste from a reverse osmosis plant. Not just because it may contaminate drinking water aquifers or reservoirs, but also because it damages ecology.
Dumping pure, clean, but very hot water wherever you like is considered thermal pollution. It doesn't take a genius to know why either. Warmer water leads to less gas solubility, less gas solubility leads to less dissolved oxygen in water, not enough dissolved oxygen in water leads to dead fish and anything else in water that needs O2. When they die, decomposition eats up all the remaining O2 in the water. Eventually anaerobic bacteria take over the system.
And that's just warm water we're talking about, something obviously non-toxic right? Forgive my reluctance to subscribe to this idea that non-toxic pollutants are somehow harmless.
BTW, CO2 may not be toxic to us, but it is having toxic effects on certain systems right now, specifically coral reefs. Elevated atmospheric CO2 has led to elevated dissolved CO2 in oceans. This results in the formation of carbonic acid, which is messing with the ocean's pH. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
In addition, there is research pointing out that vegetation can suffer when CO2 passes a certain threshold. Triggers that keep their stomata open include light, humidity, and CO2 concentration. Normally more CO2 absorbed into the stomata is fine, but unfortunately they can't absorb CO2 without also losing water. At a certain point, the extra CO2 is useless due to limiting nutrients, and they'll be less able to retain water.
Taking all of the sequestered carbon (coal/oil) that we can possibly find and putting that carbon into the atmosphere over a couple generations is not a small change. You can't double the concentration of CO2 within a time frame that amounts to a blink of an eye by geological/evolutionary timescales without the biota suffering. Evolution is too slow.
Slashdot appears to have cut off a sizable chunk of my post, so allow me to continue with a 2nd post...
Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence to prove black holes & neutron stars exist, so it's not unreasonable to assume that we could find sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory.
You take take something obviously false like ghosts and attempt to compare it to whatever you'd like to cast disrepute on. Classy. Second, to have a ghost detector, you're required to first know that ghosts exist (otherwise then your ghost detector isn't really a ghost detector).
Also, you don't seem to recognize the long history of advances in science which were purely mathematical to begin with. For example: Black holes were first predicted mathematically, without any observations to back it up. Did scientists ignore it?. Hell no. Even neutron stars were originally just theoretical too. Whenever a physicist started doing calculations involving black holes or neutron stars, did people crap all over their work and berate it to the point of halting interest in the subject? Were they castigated for exceeding the bounds of the Theory of General Relativity?
Eventually we got the technology to test both of those ideas, and the vast majority consensus is that black holes and neutron stars exist. There's no evidence yet that rules out the possible existence of sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory. Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence
Lets get something straight. An individual can be intelligent and have sincere conerns issues like aquifer sustainability. Society on the other hand is a selfish greedy bastard the likes of which most people have never bothered to even begin comprehending.
Do you think elected officials who oversee the local water utilities are going to easily raise the price of water when it is detrimental to their reelection campaign?
Raising the cost of water utilities is analogous to raising the cost of gasoline via a tax. We'll never drive efficient cars unless the price of gas goes up into that discomfort-zone (remember $4/gal?). Keeping the cost of gas that high would have done wonders, I mean absolute magic, to whipping America's ass into gear to fight things like urban sprawl, zero investment in public transportation (I live in Texas), and a quick end to SUV's. But when the price of gas went back down, people stopped caring (again).
You can try to raise the price of water. I'd advocate it. But getting elected officials to do that is like asking congress to pass a tax that jacks gasoline back up to $4/gal. It's easy to talk about on an Internet forum, but it's often not so easy in reality.
You have lots of hot water. You decide to expel it into a nearby stream or lake. Fish need dissolved oxygen. Hotter water is less able to keep dissolved gasses in solution (this is basic chemistry). You just forced all the dissolved oxygen to outgas by raising the temperature of the water. The fish/organisms suffocate and then decompose. Decomposition eats up even more dissolved oxygen. Anaerobic bacteria then take over the affected system.
Now imagine you've introduced an large concentration of anaerobic bacteria into a subterranean aquifer. Your anaerobic bacteria have colonized the base of the well pipe. Now imagine you're a city like, oh, San Antonio, where the entire city relies upon a single aquifer. Maybe your water came from that contaminated well head. Maybe not. Are you feeling lucky?
We don't call this sort of stuff thermal pollution just because we like to label any sort of waste/output "pollution". We label it as such because it has negative consequences.
By the way, I live in San Antonio, and we have a couple wells that were (probably still are) contaminated. Imagine a 2 ft diameter pipe going straight into the ground. Near the bottom of it, they had a problem with a several-inch-thick biofilm growing, constricting the pipe's flow (not to mention biologically contaminating it). If you spend a million dollars making a well, and it turns out contaminated and useless, it's a bit of a problem.
Now in this case the cause was (as far as I know) unknown, and unrelated to data centers, but the biological consequences of thermal pollution do warrant concern. You can't just dump hot water anywhere and not expect potential problems.
What makes you think waste water treatment centers bother treating water with respect to chemicals that may or may not be present in the water? They'll treat it for biological contaminants, adjust the pH and compensate for whatever chemicals they add to it, but I doubt most of them treat the water for unknown chemical contaminants. To treat a chemical contaminant, you must know what it is. It's not like there are all-purpose chemicals you can throw at these sort of things.
You don't need classes to be a good programmer. Many self-trained programmers are quite effective, and are quite famliar with basic good-design concepts. Ultimately all that matters is you can write effective code. Physicists were some of the first people that needed a good programming language to use, and now you're saying that it's not their field or area to deal with? Physicists were doing it before "Computer Science" was a major. And what's this idea about needing to know C++ in-depth? I was under the impression that physicists typically used Fortran (for good reasons).
Physics is arguably the hardest type of science. Anyone who can make a career out of studying quantum mechanics and general relativity can figure out Fortran or C++.
They may be modified but what makes you think that this specific trait was removed? Even if it was, it doesn't mean mean they wouldn't pick it up in the wild. Bacteria can pick up new DNA in all sorts of ways (read about plasmids).
And assuming that they lack this trait, and pretending they can't acquire it in the wild, the answer to your question should be obvious: They would get their asses handed to them by their competition.
Use of fossil fuels puts toxic emissions in the environment. Use of fossil fuels may contribute to global climate change. (I won't open that can of worms any further.)
Well, I study environmental science so I'm always dismayed when people actually think there's even a reason to doubt GCC (climate change, not the gnu C compiler).
I think it's clear we need something on the order of the Apollo Program, the massive undertaking that developed the technology to put humanity on the moon. Something similar should be put into place for energy.
Unfortunately, this challenge is likely an order of magnitude (or two) greater than the Apollo Program's objectives were. They spent millions to put enough joules of energy a big chunk of metal with intelligent critters riding inside of it, and time it to successfully shoot toward the moon. The cost of the metal, fuel, training, and NASA facilities is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of restructuring countries like America will have to endure to become sustainable. I live in Texas, and here, if you don't have a car, you're screwed for the most part. Public transportation (which people can and will use) is rarely an option. Even worse, the region had a lot of empty space, so the cities sprawled out, making them low-density. It's harder to make a public transportation system be even remotely cost effective when everything is so spread out. Yet replacement of gasoline cars and long commutes is most likely going to be a prerequisite for any solution we adopt.
I'd prefer nuclear fission, from what I know of usable energy sources that still seems to be the most cost effective and resource efficient. But I am sure the cost and technology roadblocks to massive use of solar power, wind, tidal, solar space arrays, or even fusion energy would fall in short order if enough resources were directed at the problem.
Agreed. Nuclear fission is better than coal is. The catch is what type of nuclear fission you use. France has done it. Most of their power is from nuclear, but they don't have a dire spent-fuel-storage problem. Why? We built our reactors to eat fuel, and shit out waste. France's reactors were designed to eat fuel, shit out waste, stick that waste back in the kitchen for refinement, and then they eat their shit again. Over and over. The non-recyclable fissile waste they produce takes up quite a small volume. America has had some nuclear reactors built lately (not many though), but they don't use the reactors France does. Why? Well, status quo keeps bad shit bad even when politicians know the public knows about it, but on this issue it's an even more difficult status quo because the public doesn't put any pressure on politicians for better nuclear reactor designs.
Also keep in mind, it's very difficult politically to get conventional (american style) nuclear power plants built even when you've got some political willpower, as it involves a very large upfront cost with very little payback for many years. Of course, once you do get that cost (and wait for those many years), it can reduce your electric bill, but again, even with a few good politicians, if you can pull it off, it'll be by a slim margin.
Now if you try doing that with a new type of nuclear facility, the contractors here can't copy/paste what they've done before. They need to design the a new facility. That's a huge upfront cost that probably would kill any collection of cities/states that wanted to use one. Even worse, (how can it get worse?!) is that doesn't even touch on the cost of building the infrastructure/facility for recycling of spent nuclear material (I was just talking about the reactor itself).
The only way to get nuclear to where it should be would be to have the Federal Governmentâ step in and enact a plan to replace coal plants with nuclear ones. I promise that'll send the coal lobbyists marching. Coal companies will start
Then they can maintain the status quo by behaving like any other bacteria, which means we can ignore them.
Bacteria responsible for synthesizing something that costs a lot of energy typically have a plan for shutting it off when they don't need it. I remember seeing on a flow chart for the nitrogen cycle, there was one brach of it that can go either forward or backward, depending on the environment's carbon to nitrogen ratio.
We can anthropomorphize the situation to produce an analogy: America is scared that Canada has built a massive new weapon that could annihilate them. But as it turns out, this new super weapon's power requirements are so large, they can't really pull the trigger enough times to win a war with it. So they are still forced to choose between conventional weapons or getting their asses handed to them.
I don't think cellulose degrading organisms will spend the energy required to break cellulose down if they don't have to. Just because they can break down cellulose doesn't mean that it is preferable. (except in our bio-reactors where we force them to eat only what we're willing to hand them)
It's also worth considering which ones get subsidies. To me, giving subsidies to companies which deal with fossil-fuel energy sources (or even taxing it less than you would tax other things) seems ridiculous, as it just entrenches their place in our economy rather than giving us the flexibility we need to feasibly switch energy technologies.
Also, people need to ditch the idea of "technology will save us". We aren't entitled to fusion power or any other source of energy that will magically save us any more than we were entitled to flying cars 40 years ago. Everyone needs to simply accept that 1) fossil fuel prices will need to rise, or 2) they have to invest a lot of money now in the technology investment. Either way, you have to pay more money. It's just a matter of when and where you pay it. We can't expect anyone (much less everyone) to transition to these technologies while we're in our "comfort zone" (i.e., cheap gasoline prices). The masses take the path of least resistance, and hopefully the current path gets more resistance sooner than later, or we may not have time to establish the infrastructure for whatever our future energy source(s) requires. It would really suck if oil shortages happened again just as we were to launch a massive campaign to build a lot of new hydrogen/solar/fission/whatever facilities to make ends meet. Having the technology isn't enough. You have to know that you have enough of your old "dirty" resources left at feasible prices to build enough of the technology for everyone.
As the paper states, these micro-organisms are viable but don't respond to culturing. Which could mean they were alive but are dormant and don't respond to conditions here on earth.
Whoa, woah there buddy. Did you consider the possibility that maybe they "don't respond to culturing" because bacteria that exclusively exist in an upper atmosphere don't like being stuck to a semi-wet petri dish at 1 atmosphere of pressure? They're totally different environments. Granted, I doubt their culturing technique was honestly as crude as conventional petri dish work, but I was making a general point about it being likely a limitation of "how" they tried to culture it.
When you make the agar or whatever medium you plan to use to cultivate any microscopic critter en masse, you're inevitably going to create a selection pressure (sometimes on purpose, sometimes it's a side effect), depending on what nutrients it supplies. I've glanced at a lengthy catalogue of agars I once saw in a microbiology lab. There's a lot of types, but they need them all for different situations. Again, I have no clue how they tried to culture them, but I'm guessing stratospheric microbiology is a relatively new thing, so I wouldn't expect the culturing techniques to be as good they should be for this purpose.
On top of that, from what I understood, we can only culture a surprisingly small fraction of microorganisms anyway. Also, culturing extremophiles has always been very hard. And I'm pretty sure this one counts as an extremophile.
There are going to be plenty of terrestrial explanations for them being uncultivable which do not lend any support to them having a population outside of Earth's biosphere.
I'm sorry. I thought I was allowed to express opinions which aren't in lock-step with overly excited, premature knee-jerk reactions to any fusion-related story that happens to get linked here. Clearly I'm at fault.
Oh wait, this thing actually hasn't achieved a self-sustainable fusion reaction yet?! Sounds to me like somebody's getting all uppity over someone not inserting a fusion-will-fix-it plug into a comment which was strictly about freshwater reserves.
I hope fusion eventually gets to where we'd like it to be, (and as quickly as possible), but I think I should point out that commercial fusion power utilities don't automatically follow just because they've gotten a fusion reaction to reach ignition (which they haven't even accomplished yet). You also have to prove that the means for commercially producing deuterium & tritium fuel are equally self-sustaining as well. Everything from fuel creation, to storage, to waste management needs to be factored into that. It's comforting to assume that something will work, but you still have to actually demonstrate it works before claiming it's a definite solution.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. No idiot should be making plans based on expected future technologies which don't exist yet. A good administrator can tell you that you make your plans based on what you know you'll actually have to work with (otherwise it's called being incompetent). This thing hasn't reached its goal-line any more than the LHC has discovered the Higgs Boson (yet). And even if it had ignition tomorrow, you have to establish a hydrogen-infrastructure & commercially sustainable deuterium/tritium fuel supplies. And it's simply not enough to have fusion "whenever". There is a deadline and the clock is ticking. There's no guarantees that fusion power plants will be ready before we have painful shortages on fossil fuels. Anyone building a water desalinization plant due to open in the year 2021 based on the assumption that it'll be run by a fusion power plant is a moron. Forty years ago many thought we'd have flying cars by now, but we don't. Just because we want it doesn't mean we will have it. Just because we need it doesn't mean we will have it. This entitlement complex involving technology which doesn't even exist yet needs to end.
Dwell on that my friend.
(I may sound like I'm being overly harsh (in tone), but please don't take it personally. I'm mostly just fed up this "technological entitlement complex", as I see it invoked everywhere, especially by politicians and it is flat out dangerous).
Or reverse osmosis. But neither distillation nor reverse osmosis are cheap in terms of energy. And believe it or not, the extremely salty water you get leftover can be considered a hazardous waste which requires careful disposal. You can't always just eject the highly concentrated brine wherever you like.
Also, don't expect energy to stay cheap. Fossil fuels are obviously finite. Compound that with a steady growth rate in the amount of energy used each year (think exponential growth functions).
Freshwater supplies can easily become a problem in our lifetimes. Personally, I think there might be some hope in retrofitting submarines/boats/retired-oil rigs with equipment that can get the reverse-osmosis done for free (I'll give you a clue: at what depth do you have to sink to to get around 10 MPa?). Of course under that idea, you're still spending energy transporting the water...
Promoting popular interest in science arguably has value. Many people don't know nor care about the ISS, but this can correct a bit of that apathy. Public awareness is rarely a bad thing, especially in the case of science that's funded by the government using their tax dollars.
And besides, many people in science enjoy Colbert just as much as everyone else does.
He has had plenty of scientists on his show before (certainly more than most TV shows have on as guests).
Slashdot Mirror
As well as French reinforcements.
I don't have faith in the free-market: faith is the belief in something without reason, or despite reason.
I'm gonna venture a guess and say you hate religion so much you feel the word "faith" has a dirty connotation which you don't like being associated with yourself. If this is the case, you're either unfamiliar with more general usage of the word "faith" or you're being overly defensive (personally I assume it's the former).
Either way, it's entirely your own error. The word faith can be used interchangeably with words like trust or belief. Trust, belief, and faith, can exist in the presence of supporting evidence. For example: "I believe the theory of blahblahblah is correct in the presence of this evidence here". Do note that this (hypothetical) evidence would not necessarily proof of the theory, so you can't say it is absolutely known with certainty to be true, so the applicability of faith isn't excluded.
(That said, I have to say I don't see this evidence you referred to. Please cite me a country who's economy is more laissez-faire yet also enjoys superior consumer safety & quality compared to us).
I agree that the government should work to protect the individual - but I disagree that having an FDA (or many of the myriad alphabet agencies), actually do that. In essence because what these agencies do is substitute their will for the will of the market participants.
You trust the drug companies when they pull these sorts of shenanigans? http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/03/0348243
Game theory says that the free market economics could arguably work, but only in scenarios with perfect (or near perfect) information among all players. Making fake medical journals kinda highlights the fact that they're not willing to allow such an ideal market to exist. Why? It's not in their interest to do so, so they don't. Common sense right?
I'm okay with somebody in a government agency substituting their will for my own if they possess superior knowledge concerning how to go about testing for what I could consider to be harmful to my interests. Given what is poisonous to Ben is likely also poisonous to Jerry, it's not unreasonable to say that government screening of toxic materials in food is universally in everyone's interests. If they know how to test for this crap, let them. They'll be better at the lab work than I would be. (not to mention, I don't have the time to test for toxins in all my food before I eat it).
So even if companies could create better mechanisms for quality control, they are mandated (at the point of a gun) to follow the bureaucrats' whims.
Nothing in the law forces companies to practice less-safe or less-healthy policies than they wish. Nobody is forcing Monsanto to genetically engineer anything that contaminates non GMO crops. If companies in a free market are able to produce safer food/drugs when big brother isn't looking over their shoulder, why don't they do it now? Specifically, give me an example of how the FDA would prevent a food producer from selling me cleaner food than what they currently sell me.
In a free-market, reputation must be earned, and can easily be lost. Also in a free-market, harm or fraud is a crime (protection from criminals is a legitimate function of the government.
I'll take the results of a regular lab-tests over someone's "reputation" any day. Regulators' tests can also can be used to establish certainty something is safe before harm occurs. This is valuable because preventing damage is always cheaper, easier, and more effective than trying to remediate it after it's been allowed to occur.
In Capitalism, your "nice cool glass of melamine laced milk" would land you a "nice long stay in the penitentiary". See? No FDA required.
So you're saying
Come on, seriously.
Why did Apple make the iPhone, when it could have made a junky piece plastic that falls apart when you touch it?
I'll tell you why - because in a free market, the spoils go to those who give people what they want and need.
Which is exactly why you would not see some kind of persistent "unsanitary meat" problem in a free-market.
You've found one high quality product or service you like and you're attempting to use it as proof that all products/services are good and high quality. The problem is that, besides this being an obvious logical fallacy, we know from simple experience there are bad products and bad services.
Please don't tell me you are referring to the work of the hack-novelist-pretending-to-be-historian Upton Sinclair. Sinclair was a fiction writer with an agenda to smear hard-working industrialists by pretending to give an historical account and passing it off as "fact".
I have a family member who works in the FDA, and I've heard stories about "don't eat this", or "don't eat that" due to what they've historically found them guilty of. People nowadays DO still try to scam the market with unsanitary food. It occurs on a daily basis. Without the FDA, you'd end up eating quite a bit of this stuff.
I get it. You believe and have faith in the free-market system and this gives you incentive to criticize anything that challenges your free-market dogmas. But meanwhile in the real world, people are trying to feed you poisonous crap, and will do so unless government intervenes. Wishing otherwise doesn't make it so.
If you don't believe that your food's quality would drop the day they deregulate the food industry, I've got a nice cool glass of melamine laced milk to show you...
There's not some super-secret version of the Bible that you only get to look at after 15 years of faithful service and huge stacks of cash donations to the Vatican.
How do you know that?
It's known, for instance, that the Church suppressed the Gospel of Thomas. The only remaining full copy that we know of was found at Nag Hammadi in the 20th century. It escaped the purge by virtue of being hidden for 1800 years or so.
If the Scientologists are ultimately successful in suppressing Operation Clambake and similar efforts, it's conceivable that the full text of LRH's teachings will similarly disappear from history, to be replaced in the public consciousness with a less controversial, Church-sanitized version.
Back in the year 325, you could get away with burning scrolls to censor heretical texts.
But nowadays we have something called the Internet. Good luck erasing *anything* that's remotely interesting about a controversial multi-national religious cult.
We already tried the libertarian style economics. Crack open a history book and read about why government started regulating things. It invites itself to stock manipulation, trust schemes, unsanitary products, child labor and hazardous working conditions. No single social construct should be responsible for everything, not government, nor corporations. The goal should be balance.
The problem with your reasoning is that when a free-market entity produces an inferior product, service, or solution, it will eventually fail. This is actually a good thing, as it weeds out (most of) the idiots, making room for others with better ideas to flourish.
Sure, let them fail. In the meantime, the products or services they provided will become unavailable to consumers while we wait for new companies with less experience. That experience usually helps make whatever they produce more efficient than what the startup company which would try to replace them would do. A high corporate-death/corporate-birth turnover rate would make for a painfully unstable economy.
"Free markets must convince you to voluntarily consume their products instead of a competitor's."
When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack. You will have to buy somebody's cheaply produced yet unsanitary meat because it's the only thing available on the market. It's not like this hasn't happened before.
I'd love to hear how a free-market fundamentalist would justify deregulating something like, say, an airline industry, and simply let them decide what is and isn't safe in terms of airline maintenance. The only way for consumers to abandon something like an unsafe airline would be for people to first start dying (otherwise how would you know it wasn't safe?).
Government can have proactively improve the quality & safety of products and services whereas consumers in a purely free-market airline industry can't always do the same. Free-market consumer decisions are almost always reactive, occurring after somebody has suffered damages or purchased damaged goods. There is no incentive in free-market economics to do anything beyond what you must in order to make a buck. Government (who's sole motive isn't greed for money, but rather fear of being elected out of office) serves as a good check against a company, who's sole responsibility is to make a profit for whomever owns the company. Lust for power checks lust for money. Not perfect, but better than no check at all.
Free-market economics have had failures throughout history. Not just in terms of corporate-failures, but in terms of public health, public safety, and quality of life. Ignore history at your own peril.
Evolution comes into play even before there are biological organisms. Galaxies evolve, solar systems evolve
Sorry, but galaxies and solar systems don't evolve because they aren't adapting to anything nor do they self replicate.
Turned tail? What makes you think America stopped going out of cowardice? You can only collect so many moon-rocks before people start to ask the question of whether or not it's worth the billions of dollars it costs to keep going.
Btw, "China" and "better technology"? I'm gonna have to call [citation needed] on that one. If I didn't already know you were trying to be serious, that would be interpreted as a funny joke. China doesn't compare to most developed nations in terms of innovation. Especially in terms of quality of technology. Their idea of "innovation" is making cheap rip-offs of what others have designed.
Uh, hopefully this isn't news or anything, but well, we already won that race. Several decades ago. When the available technology was crappier. In fact, we went more than once, so we've lapped them multiple times.
Frankly, I think NASA's better off moving on to one of the next two big space-race checkpoints:
1) Mars (I'm sorta "meh" about that one).
2) Find a way to clean up all of our orbital debris. (While not glamorous, this is going to be a prerequisite for us becoming a space-faring species).
Do not confuse tree-huggers with environmentalists or environmental scientists.
Nuclear is considered "green" by many simply because it's the lesser of two evils (compared to coal). It produces half as much CO2 (the reason it produces any is due to ore refinement). In reality, there's more ambient radiation surrounding coal plants than nuclear plants.
Regarding wind: Any bird that is clipped by a windmill is as good as dead, the tips of those sucks spin much faster than they appear, but ultimately, windmills didn't even come close the killing as many birds as windows do. For an endangered species of bird, I can see someone arguing against a wind farm in a specific flyway, but otherwise it seems silly to me.
Hydro: Moot. We've already put a dam in every place that we could think. I doubt anyone will be tearing any dams down for any reasons.
Solar: That is a strawman. No serious parties are claiming solar should be regarded as an undesirable option.
But, what's really insidious about the "global warming" crowd is that they got people to think about carbon dioxide (CO2) as a polluting gas. CO2 is not pollution. Sure, you can get CO2 poisoning, but then, you can also die from eating too much salt or sugar (or water on the flip side). CO2 per se is not toxic, it's not "pollution". You breathe it out, and plants need them for photosynthesis.
Fact: The term "Pollutants" normally includes any material which is significantly detrimental to an environmental system. The EPA's job isn't just to protect human health, but to protect environmental systems as well.
Dumping sufficiently concentrated salt water wherever you please can easily be illegal, such as brine waste from a reverse osmosis plant. Not just because it may contaminate drinking water aquifers or reservoirs, but also because it damages ecology.
Dumping pure, clean, but very hot water wherever you like is considered thermal pollution. It doesn't take a genius to know why either. Warmer water leads to less gas solubility, less gas solubility leads to less dissolved oxygen in water, not enough dissolved oxygen in water leads to dead fish and anything else in water that needs O2. When they die, decomposition eats up all the remaining O2 in the water. Eventually anaerobic bacteria take over the system.
And that's just warm water we're talking about, something obviously non-toxic right? Forgive my reluctance to subscribe to this idea that non-toxic pollutants are somehow harmless.
BTW, CO2 may not be toxic to us, but it is having toxic effects on certain systems right now, specifically coral reefs. Elevated atmospheric CO2 has led to elevated dissolved CO2 in oceans. This results in the formation of carbonic acid, which is messing with the ocean's pH.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
In addition, there is research pointing out that vegetation can suffer when CO2 passes a certain threshold. Triggers that keep their stomata open include light, humidity, and CO2 concentration. Normally more CO2 absorbed into the stomata is fine, but unfortunately they can't absorb CO2 without also losing water. At a certain point, the extra CO2 is useless due to limiting nutrients, and they'll be less able to retain water.
Taking all of the sequestered carbon (coal/oil) that we can possibly find and putting that carbon into the atmosphere over a couple generations is not a small change. You can't double the concentration of CO2 within a time frame that amounts to a blink of an eye by geological/evolutionary timescales without the biota suffering. Evolution is too slow.
Slashdot appears to have cut off a sizable chunk of my post, so allow me to continue with a 2nd post...
Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence to prove black holes & neutron stars exist, so it's not unreasonable to assume that we could find sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory.
Lastly, the use of the world theory here is arguably legit. Not in a scientific context, but rather in a mathematical context. Ever heard of Set theory, game theory and chaos theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Fields_of_study_called_.22theories.22
Those are fields of math, and until there are experiments, arguably string theory is too.
You take take something obviously false like ghosts and attempt to compare it to whatever you'd like to cast disrepute on. Classy. Second, to have a ghost detector, you're required to first know that ghosts exist (otherwise then your ghost detector isn't really a ghost detector).
Also, you don't seem to recognize the long history of advances in science which were purely mathematical to begin with. For example: Black holes were first predicted mathematically, without any observations to back it up. Did scientists ignore it?. Hell no. Even neutron stars were originally just theoretical too. Whenever a physicist started doing calculations involving black holes or neutron stars, did people crap all over their work and berate it to the point of halting interest in the subject? Were they castigated for exceeding the bounds of the Theory of General Relativity?
Eventually we got the technology to test both of those ideas, and the vast majority consensus is that black holes and neutron stars exist. There's no evidence yet that rules out the possible existence of sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory. Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence
Lets get something straight.
An individual can be intelligent and have sincere conerns issues like aquifer sustainability.
Society on the other hand is a selfish greedy bastard the likes of which most people have never bothered to even begin comprehending.
Do you think elected officials who oversee the local water utilities are going to easily raise the price of water when it is detrimental to their reelection campaign?
Raising the cost of water utilities is analogous to raising the cost of gasoline via a tax. We'll never drive efficient cars unless the price of gas goes up into that discomfort-zone (remember $4/gal?). Keeping the cost of gas that high would have done wonders, I mean absolute magic, to whipping America's ass into gear to fight things like urban sprawl, zero investment in public transportation (I live in Texas), and a quick end to SUV's. But when the price of gas went back down, people stopped caring (again).
You can try to raise the price of water. I'd advocate it. But getting elected officials to do that is like asking congress to pass a tax that jacks gasoline back up to $4/gal. It's easy to talk about on an Internet forum, but it's often not so easy in reality.
You have lots of hot water.
You decide to expel it into a nearby stream or lake.
Fish need dissolved oxygen.
Hotter water is less able to keep dissolved gasses in solution (this is basic chemistry).
You just forced all the dissolved oxygen to outgas by raising the temperature of the water.
The fish/organisms suffocate and then decompose.
Decomposition eats up even more dissolved oxygen.
Anaerobic bacteria then take over the affected system.
Now imagine you've introduced an large concentration of anaerobic bacteria into a subterranean aquifer.
Your anaerobic bacteria have colonized the base of the well pipe.
Now imagine you're a city like, oh, San Antonio, where the entire city relies upon a single aquifer. Maybe your water came from that contaminated well head. Maybe not. Are you feeling lucky?
We don't call this sort of stuff thermal pollution just because we like to label any sort of waste/output "pollution". We label it as such because it has negative consequences.
By the way, I live in San Antonio, and we have a couple wells that were (probably still are) contaminated. Imagine a 2 ft diameter pipe going straight into the ground. Near the bottom of it, they had a problem with a several-inch-thick biofilm growing, constricting the pipe's flow (not to mention biologically contaminating it). If you spend a million dollars making a well, and it turns out contaminated and useless, it's a bit of a problem.
Now in this case the cause was (as far as I know) unknown, and unrelated to data centers, but the biological consequences of thermal pollution do warrant concern. You can't just dump hot water anywhere and not expect potential problems.
What makes you think waste water treatment centers bother treating water with respect to chemicals that may or may not be present in the water? They'll treat it for biological contaminants, adjust the pH and compensate for whatever chemicals they add to it, but I doubt most of them treat the water for unknown chemical contaminants. To treat a chemical contaminant, you must know what it is. It's not like there are all-purpose chemicals you can throw at these sort of things.
Low humidity... swamp?
Where do you find one of those?
You don't need classes to be a good programmer. Many self-trained programmers are quite effective, and are quite famliar with basic good-design concepts. Ultimately all that matters is you can write effective code. Physicists were some of the first people that needed a good programming language to use, and now you're saying that it's not their field or area to deal with? Physicists were doing it before "Computer Science" was a major. And what's this idea about needing to know C++ in-depth? I was under the impression that physicists typically used Fortran (for good reasons).
Physics is arguably the hardest type of science. Anyone who can make a career out of studying quantum mechanics and general relativity can figure out Fortran or C++.
They may be modified but what makes you think that this specific trait was removed? Even if it was, it doesn't mean mean they wouldn't pick it up in the wild. Bacteria can pick up new DNA in all sorts of ways (read about plasmids).
And assuming that they lack this trait, and pretending they can't acquire it in the wild, the answer to your question should be obvious: They would get their asses handed to them by their competition.
I agree.
Use of fossil fuels puts toxic emissions in the environment. Use of fossil fuels may contribute to global climate change. (I won't open that can of worms any further.)
Well, I study environmental science so I'm always dismayed when people actually think there's even a reason to doubt GCC (climate change, not the gnu C compiler).
I think it's clear we need something on the order of the Apollo Program, the massive undertaking that developed the technology to put humanity on the moon. Something similar should be put into place for energy.
Unfortunately, this challenge is likely an order of magnitude (or two) greater than the Apollo Program's objectives were. They spent millions to put enough joules of energy a big chunk of metal with intelligent critters riding inside of it, and time it to successfully shoot toward the moon. The cost of the metal, fuel, training, and NASA facilities is a drop in the bucket compared to the kind of restructuring countries like America will have to endure to become sustainable. I live in Texas, and here, if you don't have a car, you're screwed for the most part. Public transportation (which people can and will use) is rarely an option. Even worse, the region had a lot of empty space, so the cities sprawled out, making them low-density. It's harder to make a public transportation system be even remotely cost effective when everything is so spread out. Yet replacement of gasoline cars and long commutes is most likely going to be a prerequisite for any solution we adopt.
I'd prefer nuclear fission, from what I know of usable energy sources that still seems to be the most cost effective and resource efficient. But I am sure the cost and technology roadblocks to massive use of solar power, wind, tidal, solar space arrays, or even fusion energy would fall in short order if enough resources were directed at the problem.
Agreed. Nuclear fission is better than coal is. The catch is what type of nuclear fission you use. France has done it. Most of their power is from nuclear, but they don't have a dire spent-fuel-storage problem. Why? We built our reactors to eat fuel, and shit out waste. France's reactors were designed to eat fuel, shit out waste, stick that waste back in the kitchen for refinement, and then they eat their shit again. Over and over. The non-recyclable fissile waste they produce takes up quite a small volume. America has had some nuclear reactors built lately (not many though), but they don't use the reactors France does. Why? Well, status quo keeps bad shit bad even when politicians know the public knows about it, but on this issue it's an even more difficult status quo because the public doesn't put any pressure on politicians for better nuclear reactor designs.
Also keep in mind, it's very difficult politically to get conventional (american style) nuclear power plants built even when you've got some political willpower, as it involves a very large upfront cost with very little payback for many years. Of course, once you do get that cost (and wait for those many years), it can reduce your electric bill, but again, even with a few good politicians, if you can pull it off, it'll be by a slim margin.
Now if you try doing that with a new type of nuclear facility, the contractors here can't copy/paste what they've done before. They need to design the a new facility. That's a huge upfront cost that probably would kill any collection of cities/states that wanted to use one. Even worse, (how can it get worse?!) is that doesn't even touch on the cost of building the infrastructure/facility for recycling of spent nuclear material (I was just talking about the reactor itself).
The only way to get nuclear to where it should be would be to have the Federal Governmentâ step in and enact a plan to replace coal plants with nuclear ones. I promise that'll send the coal lobbyists marching. Coal companies will start
Then they can maintain the status quo by behaving like any other bacteria, which means we can ignore them.
Bacteria responsible for synthesizing something that costs a lot of energy typically have a plan for shutting it off when they don't need it. I remember seeing on a flow chart for the nitrogen cycle, there was one brach of it that can go either forward or backward, depending on the environment's carbon to nitrogen ratio.
We can anthropomorphize the situation to produce an analogy: America is scared that Canada has built a massive new weapon that could annihilate them. But as it turns out, this new super weapon's power requirements are so large, they can't really pull the trigger enough times to win a war with it. So they are still forced to choose between conventional weapons or getting their asses handed to them.
I don't think cellulose degrading organisms will spend the energy required to break cellulose down if they don't have to. Just because they can break down cellulose doesn't mean that it is preferable. (except in our bio-reactors where we force them to eat only what we're willing to hand them)
It's also worth considering which ones get subsidies. To me, giving subsidies to companies which deal with fossil-fuel energy sources (or even taxing it less than you would tax other things) seems ridiculous, as it just entrenches their place in our economy rather than giving us the flexibility we need to feasibly switch energy technologies.
Also, people need to ditch the idea of "technology will save us". We aren't entitled to fusion power or any other source of energy that will magically save us any more than we were entitled to flying cars 40 years ago. Everyone needs to simply accept that 1) fossil fuel prices will need to rise, or 2) they have to invest a lot of money now in the technology investment. Either way, you have to pay more money. It's just a matter of when and where you pay it. We can't expect anyone (much less everyone) to transition to these technologies while we're in our "comfort zone" (i.e., cheap gasoline prices). The masses take the path of least resistance, and hopefully the current path gets more resistance sooner than later, or we may not have time to establish the infrastructure for whatever our future energy source(s) requires. It would really suck if oil shortages happened again just as we were to launch a massive campaign to build a lot of new hydrogen/solar/fission/whatever facilities to make ends meet. Having the technology isn't enough. You have to know that you have enough of your old "dirty" resources left at feasible prices to build enough of the technology for everyone.
As the paper states, these micro-organisms are viable but don't respond to culturing. Which could mean they were alive but are dormant and don't respond to conditions here on earth.
Whoa, woah there buddy. Did you consider the possibility that maybe they "don't respond to culturing" because bacteria that exclusively exist in an upper atmosphere don't like being stuck to a semi-wet petri dish at 1 atmosphere of pressure? They're totally different environments. Granted, I doubt their culturing technique was honestly as crude as conventional petri dish work, but I was making a general point about it being likely a limitation of "how" they tried to culture it.
When you make the agar or whatever medium you plan to use to cultivate any microscopic critter en masse, you're inevitably going to create a selection pressure (sometimes on purpose, sometimes it's a side effect), depending on what nutrients it supplies. I've glanced at a lengthy catalogue of agars I once saw in a microbiology lab. There's a lot of types, but they need them all for different situations. Again, I have no clue how they tried to culture them, but I'm guessing stratospheric microbiology is a relatively new thing, so I wouldn't expect the culturing techniques to be as good they should be for this purpose.
On top of that, from what I understood, we can only culture a surprisingly small fraction of microorganisms anyway. Also, culturing extremophiles has always been very hard. And I'm pretty sure this one counts as an extremophile.
There are going to be plenty of terrestrial explanations for them being uncultivable which do not lend any support to them having a population outside of Earth's biosphere.
I'm sorry. I thought I was allowed to express opinions which aren't in lock-step with overly excited, premature knee-jerk reactions to any fusion-related story that happens to get linked here. Clearly I'm at fault.
Oh wait, this thing actually hasn't achieved a self-sustainable fusion reaction yet?! Sounds to me like somebody's getting all uppity over someone not inserting a fusion-will-fix-it plug into a comment which was strictly about freshwater reserves.
I hope fusion eventually gets to where we'd like it to be, (and as quickly as possible), but I think I should point out that commercial fusion power utilities don't automatically follow just because they've gotten a fusion reaction to reach ignition (which they haven't even accomplished yet). You also have to prove that the means for commercially producing deuterium & tritium fuel are equally self-sustaining as well. Everything from fuel creation, to storage, to waste management needs to be factored into that. It's comforting to assume that something will work, but you still have to actually demonstrate it works before claiming it's a definite solution.
Don't count your chickens before they hatch. No idiot should be making plans based on expected future technologies which don't exist yet. A good administrator can tell you that you make your plans based on what you know you'll actually have to work with (otherwise it's called being incompetent). This thing hasn't reached its goal-line any more than the LHC has discovered the Higgs Boson (yet). And even if it had ignition tomorrow, you have to establish a hydrogen-infrastructure & commercially sustainable deuterium/tritium fuel supplies. And it's simply not enough to have fusion "whenever". There is a deadline and the clock is ticking. There's no guarantees that fusion power plants will be ready before we have painful shortages on fossil fuels. Anyone building a water desalinization plant due to open in the year 2021 based on the assumption that it'll be run by a fusion power plant is a moron. Forty years ago many thought we'd have flying cars by now, but we don't. Just because we want it doesn't mean we will have it. Just because we need it doesn't mean we will have it. This entitlement complex involving technology which doesn't even exist yet needs to end.
Dwell on that my friend.
(I may sound like I'm being overly harsh (in tone), but please don't take it personally. I'm mostly just fed up this "technological entitlement complex", as I see it invoked everywhere, especially by politicians and it is flat out dangerous).
Or reverse osmosis. But neither distillation nor reverse osmosis are cheap in terms of energy. And believe it or not, the extremely salty water you get leftover can be considered a hazardous waste which requires careful disposal. You can't always just eject the highly concentrated brine wherever you like.
Also, don't expect energy to stay cheap. Fossil fuels are obviously finite. Compound that with a steady growth rate in the amount of energy used each year (think exponential growth functions).
Freshwater supplies can easily become a problem in our lifetimes. Personally, I think there might be some hope in retrofitting submarines/boats/retired-oil rigs with equipment that can get the reverse-osmosis done for free (I'll give you a clue: at what depth do you have to sink to to get around 10 MPa?). Of course under that idea, you're still spending energy transporting the water...
Promoting popular interest in science arguably has value. Many people don't know nor care about the ISS, but this can correct a bit of that apathy. Public awareness is rarely a bad thing, especially in the case of science that's funded by the government using their tax dollars.
And besides, many people in science enjoy Colbert just as much as everyone else does.
He has had plenty of scientists on his show before (certainly more than most TV shows have on as guests).