As Google's outtage hopefully demonstrated, cloud computing is risky and it is better to depend on as few contract resources as possible.
No, all it indicates is that a lot of people are idiots who overreact to whatever hype the media is currently blabbering about. It's why you get 60 hour waiting times in every ER when the media says that some horrible new disease has just killed 15 people in the past two months.
The rest are well aware that any locally hosted service will have an even worse reliability than google or cost so much it's not worth it for most people.
Because I don't have to support a research staff with grant money which is based on getting government money by making whatever you're working on seem relevant to whatever the government is giving out money for? You're working on space mirrors to provide light for farming in remote areas? Now it's space mirrors to reflect light and stop global warming.
I get the impression that these are proposals not plans. The later has actual science, cost analysis, simulations and so on behind it. The former is a vague guess at these things trying to get money for the later.
I mean, so much depends on sunlight that limiting it seems like there's no way it ca possibly end well. This isn't countering global warming, this is throwing another massive climate change into the mix that may on average even out temperature changes. It's like treating an infected wound by setting a person's arm on fire.
I mean climate and plant life depend on sunlight. So how can you not expect to get famines, mass ecological changes, large scale climate changes and so on.
I would dispute this, also. Mice are more accurate at controlling first person shooters. Better is something different, entirely.
No in this sense more accurate is better. Why? Because no matter how much ergonomic something is if you spend 99% of your time lying dead on the ground you'll still want to chuck that lovely piece of plastic through the tv.
There' apparently two different lines of studies that I've found: a) The human attention span is somewhere between 6-20 minutes then we zone out. b) Productivity takes 20-40 minutes to establish itself in humans. Interruption during that time cause stress and restart the process.
I can only guess, without any evidence, that each is considering very different types of activities. A meeting may fall under the first while coding or writing may fall under the second. Maybe the activities considered in the second type of study naturally were varied enough to not cause problems. Coding may require many different types of subs tasks so it's inherently not monotonous.
It'd be nice if someone who knew the subject could comment on this discrepancy.
Define "a lot." There's probably already hundreds if not thousands of backend servers for street view simply to let users access it. And of course the blurring algorithms they use right now probably require more computing power than matching photos would.
Clearly my history classes were deficient. They didn't teach me about the use of credit cards during the great depression. Thanks for bringing me up to speed, smart-ass.
Credit cards are simply a type of loan if a balance is kept on them, not sure why you find that so hard to understand. Loans have existed for a long time.
You're right, I'm sure there's no chance of any kind of mis-allocation of capital when the government agency that prints money is completely fucking automated in the middle of a recession.
Nothing is completely automated. Someone looks over the daily tallies, someone receives the shipment of money and so on. Since everything is now actually tracked it's probably harder to change how much money is made without anyone who can do something about it noticing.
As someone else mentioned, some assembly line worker would know jack shit about how much is actually being added into circulation.
Oh you're absolutely right. I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But obviously there is some ulterior motive for automating this workforce to such an extent.
No, they're simply trying to be more efficient. You know, like all the other tens of thousands of companies that have automated themselves.
Hauling around money isn't particularly difficult, dangerous or precision work.
They're hauling coins around. Drums of them. You know coins, those thing made out of metal. That heavy dense stuff that does bad things if it accidentally falls on your foot, right? Like the summary says it's boring repetitive work and humans aren't really made for that. Machines are.
I wonder if you're the same type of person who complains about government inefficiency and waste of money. Or do you maybe believe in some sort of quasi-communist system where everyone works and ten people do the job of one guy just to make sure of that?
But it is frightening to think about how much financial engineering has gone on in recent years. Printing money is literally no longer necessary in order to inflate the currency. Credit limits can be increased electronically. Paychecks are direct-deposited. It's just bank balances, like you say.
So moving from paper bank balances to electronic balances, with twenty backups including paper, somehow makes things infinitely worse? I mean, you do know that it's all been little figures stored somewhere for well over a century if not longer, right? Go look up the great depression on wikipedia if your history classes were that deficient.
While you certainly can go overboard and start doing it at the exclusion of everything else in your life, well you can do that for ANYTHING in your life.
Your point being? Lots of people do go overboard, some to the extent of actually dying from their disregard of even basic bodily needs. There's programs right now for people who are addicted to sex and probably dozens of other things. Gaming and the internet are no different.
Going online isn't a problem. Spending 18 hours a day online is a problem and that is labeled as addiction.
With such endeavors there is the internal opinion issue: in case of a failed take-off (think Challenger or Columbia) what happens with the nuclear reactor? NASA will have to prove even in such situation the reactor is going to be 100% safe.
NASA has launched RTGs multiple times, known problem and already dealt with.
If the American public will accept the safety assurances of NASA, then the Russians and the Chinese are going to raise HELL about the idea of having nuclear energy in space. No, it's not about atomic bombs - but nuclear reactors can easily be used as energy sources for powerful lasers.
Lasers aren't that useful as weapons and you can use solar panels for those if you really want. But frankly no one would give a damn because if you want to power a military weapon you shove your reactor up on a secret satellite that no one knows the insides of. Do you think the dozens of nuclear powered satellites launched in the cold war were told of to the enemy?
NASA might be able to persuade the American public, but will never persuade the Russians and the Chinese about somethign that indirectly can obliterate their satelites and misiles.
You can obliterate a satellite with a well targeted bb, it's beyond trivial to destroy them if you really want to. No one needs nuclear reactors to destroy them and those are much too conspicuous. Frankly the hard part is targeting a satellite but that's mostly been worked out by now.
ICBMS are a different issue but the star wars idea is dead, buried and decomposing. The budget for that has almost no chance of getting by voters since a single satellite does not cover a planet and thirty cost a lot even without r&d costs.
Because humanity frankly doesn't give a damn about space. Most of those eastern space programs exist for the same reasons the ones in the 60s did, nationalism and national ego boosting. They don't want to work together with other nations too much because that goes against the whole point of them having a space program.
The budget percent other nations use for space exploration pretty clearly shows how much they care or rather don't care. Hell even those eastern nations don't put that much money into space travel but only enough to keep the propaganda value up.
NASA is still by far the biggest fish in the pond and it does work together with other nations quite often.
Do you know how much money is spent on movies, video games, designer clothes, cosmetics and every other form of entertainment? If only all that money was allocated to medical research imagine what could happen. Or do you somehow draw a magical line at where "pharmaceutical companies" spend money but think everyone else can spend it any way they wish? Do YOU donate all your money, except that needed for sheer basic survival, to charities? If not then why do you expect other people to do it?
It seems you don't want to live in a capitalistic society, if that's what you want then admit it and don't beat around the bush. Otherwise shut up about companies acting to fill the needs of consumers since that's how capitalism works. Welcome to human nature. We care more about looking pretty and having fun than saving lives.
Do you know why pharmaceutical companies make cosmetics? Because people want them and pay a lot of money for them. Where do you think pharmaceutical companies get their money? Magical happy elves? If it wasn't for such drugs pharmaceutical companies would not be making as much money and those people working on such drugs wouldn't be part of the company since there wouldn't be money for them.
And the government expert witness, on the goverment's payroll of course, will say the ID is nearly infallible and you'll end up in jail. We send people to death row on little more than unreliable eye witness testimony, why do you think anyone gives a damn how many people may have copies of your ID?
As an aside, please check how much money is spent on R&D by the drug companies on maintenance drugs vs. "cure" drugs. It's not even close in terms of cash. It's very clear where the drug companies interests lie, and it's very clear that over time this impacts the kind of cure/treatments are available.
As I said, this isn't Star Trek. Cures are more often than nearly impossible for currently incurable conditions, especially with drugs, given current technological and scientific knowledge. Money put into such cures as a result provides little benefit for the dollar since the success rate in much lower and the time to market is much longer. It is more efficient in terms of both profit and helping patients to instead spend the money on maintenance drugs.
I'm sure all those people on HIV drugs that got another 20+ years of life (and another 5 years every 5 years due to new drugs) would have loved if drug companies let them all die while they spent 30 years putting that money into "cures."
Furthermore cures usually require new groundbreaking medical research which is NOT what drug companies do. Basic science is left up to universities since they're much better at it and have less incentive to hoard knowledge.
Not curing disease, not curing underlying causes... but maintenance treatment of symptoms, and underlying causes of those symptoms.
This isn't star trek, you can't take out a magical pill out of your pocket that makes a woman grow a new kidney. Hell, you we most of the time can't even make drugs to cure simple symptoms without causing horrible side effects. Don't blame pharmaceutical companies for the simple fact that science doesn't understand most of what's going on.
The job of the pharmaceutical companies isn't to choose the best treatment plan for patients, that's what doctors are for. Quite often that treatment plan involves things such as lifestyle changes, surgery, therapy and so on that have nothing to do with drugs companies.
Most drugs aren't cures for the simple fact that if a cure exists you don't need other drugs. If a cure doesn't exist you do need drugs. If you need drugs then you should try to make them the best and most pleasant drugs possible. You can't blame drug companies any more than you can blame high crime neighborhoods on police for having too many officers assigned to them.
Oh, and if there's an emergency there's a school supplied cell phone in every room just in case no students are carrying one?
Nope. There isn't. The "needed for emergencies" argument is a giant load of bullshit.
When I was in school yes there was a phone, wired, in every single classroom so teachers could easily communicate. Likewise a system existed so parents could easily call the school, whose number they knew, and reach their child if necessary.
No, investment requires the EXPECTATION of growth. Expecttion requires that over the long term that's what happens.
No, investors try to basically bound risk and returns. As you said, investments that fail to provide the proper balance aren't invested in. This is compared to other investments including whatever risk-free investments exist.
Positive return on investment doesn't require overall growth; case in point I think is that the stock market on average beats the gdp growth+inflation by a decent margin. It simply requires that investors have some ability to judge successful investments. The ones that don't quickly go bankrupt and the ones who do get invested in themselves by other people. I think bank loans are the simplest examples of the process, for example if a business wants to replace an old decrepit building with a new one that has lower maintenance costs.
In other words capitalism only requires change and it's simply a means of making that change efficient.
Gambling is different. Appart from professional gamblers and problem gamblers, people only do it for entertainment - expecting to lose. WHerever expectation of loss happens for investments, then investment capital dries up.
If you're going to assume some magical scenario then you need to consider every part of it. You can't use examples from now, when other investments exist, in scenarios that you yourself say are drastically different. Anyway, that's all irrelevant now that I think about it.
But growth is unsustainable on a finite planet.
Like I said in my other post, we're so far from hitting the limits of this planet it's not even funny. You're basically arguing Malthusian catastrophe which has been done for centuries and yet we're not all dead yet. As it's looking now there's always going to be some new technology, some new refinement, some new invention that changes everything yet again.
Also, it's very hard to end up with no overall growth. If resources are scarce than growth will be fueled by ever increasing efficiency in using existing resources. Most likely also by acquiring new resources, like say shoving an asteroid into earth orbit, since their high costs will no longer be that prohibitive. The amount of sunlight hitting this planet pretty much means we'll be colonizing other planets long before energy becomes a real problem. Real problem in this case means we're using enough, think power beamed down from space, to cause global warming directly. Everything else can be recycled one way or another.
And I'm only pointing out that the flaws you mention are ones of human nature rather than of capitalism. They afflict any system, communism was simply an example.
Investment requires the potential of growth in that investment but that doesn't mean you need overall growth. Even now most of the money to be gained from investments comes from loss in other areas rather than overall growth. Look at gambling, overall you never win however that doesn't stop a lot of people from playing. Prediction markets are another amusing example where there is no growth since the whole system is purely artificial and self-contained.
I'm assuming you're not arguing that all change needs to be stopped period, are you?
Capitalism doesn't require anything, all it does is allocate resources. Don't blame capitalism for people's and society's indifference to long term consequences. If you want efficient products then either convince people to pay more for them or take the easier way out and have the government tax things appropriately. Worked for Europe and gasoline usage.
Look at China, they're got a vaguely communist oligarchy and they're currently the number one planet rapist around. The pollution there would probably topple governments if it happened in the west. Not capitalism but sheer human short term interest and greed.
Of course that's not what you want to hear. You want a magical scapegoat that somehow is responsible for all of man's problems and whose removal will usher in a magical utopian age. In reality, the alternatives are even worse.
Capitalism is a bad system but it's pretty much showed itself to be better than the alternatives on a large scale. Or rather hybrids based mostly on capitalism have proven to be better than the alternatives. Same thing goes for democracy.
Human natures is still in the days when humanity was a bunch of small tribes whose hobby was murdering each other. That's not going to change no matter how much you cover your ears and repeat it's not true. Capitalism works because it actually assumes many humans are greedy, selfish bastards who care about little except their own satisfaction. Enough of them are ambitious, intelligent, vicious and driven to butcher any system that's foolish enough to assume they don't exist.
Just to add so we're all clear on definitions, as I understand it we're talking about these regions of dna here:
a) rna/protein coding region
b) transcribed non-coding regions (introns)
c) regulatory region
d) unknown/junk/other non-coding region
I suspect there's some additional stuff I missed but it's been a while since I cared too much about this.
In my molecular biology classes "gene" was used to refer to a, b and c as they relate to a protein. To be honest that someone would think otherwise, aside from specialized research, just seemed beyond silly to me.
The only thing "genome" may not have referred to was d) but recent advances have probably stopped that trend. Difficult to ignore something when you keep finding ways in which is matters and can't be ignored.
There's a large number of mutations happening in all these regions. The rate of mutations surviving is higher in regions b and d due to the lack of impact of those mutations. At the same time you can have quite a few mutations in regions a and c with no or almost no detrimental effect.
Slashdot Mirror
As Google's outtage hopefully demonstrated, cloud computing is risky and it is better to depend on as few contract resources as possible.
No, all it indicates is that a lot of people are idiots who overreact to whatever hype the media is currently blabbering about. It's why you get 60 hour waiting times in every ER when the media says that some horrible new disease has just killed 15 people in the past two months.
The rest are well aware that any locally hosted service will have an even worse reliability than google or cost so much it's not worth it for most people.
Because I don't have to support a research staff with grant money which is based on getting government money by making whatever you're working on seem relevant to whatever the government is giving out money for? You're working on space mirrors to provide light for farming in remote areas? Now it's space mirrors to reflect light and stop global warming.
I get the impression that these are proposals not plans. The later has actual science, cost analysis, simulations and so on behind it. The former is a vague guess at these things trying to get money for the later.
I mean, so much depends on sunlight that limiting it seems like there's no way it ca possibly end well. This isn't countering global warming, this is throwing another massive climate change into the mix that may on average even out temperature changes. It's like treating an infected wound by setting a person's arm on fire.
I mean climate and plant life depend on sunlight. So how can you not expect to get famines, mass ecological changes, large scale climate changes and so on.
I would dispute this, also. Mice are more accurate at controlling first person shooters. Better is something different, entirely.
No in this sense more accurate is better. Why? Because no matter how much ergonomic something is if you spend 99% of your time lying dead on the ground you'll still want to chuck that lovely piece of plastic through the tv.
There' apparently two different lines of studies that I've found:
a) The human attention span is somewhere between 6-20 minutes then we zone out.
b) Productivity takes 20-40 minutes to establish itself in humans. Interruption during that time cause stress and restart the process.
I can only guess, without any evidence, that each is considering very different types of activities. A meeting may fall under the first while coding or writing may fall under the second. Maybe the activities considered in the second type of study naturally were varied enough to not cause problems. Coding may require many different types of subs tasks so it's inherently not monotonous.
It'd be nice if someone who knew the subject could comment on this discrepancy.
Define "a lot." There's probably already hundreds if not thousands of backend servers for street view simply to let users access it. And of course the blurring algorithms they use right now probably require more computing power than matching photos would.
Clearly my history classes were deficient. They didn't teach me about the use of credit cards during the great depression. Thanks for bringing me up to speed, smart-ass.
Credit cards are simply a type of loan if a balance is kept on them, not sure why you find that so hard to understand. Loans have existed for a long time.
You're right, I'm sure there's no chance of any kind of mis-allocation of capital when the government agency that prints money is completely fucking automated in the middle of a recession.
Nothing is completely automated. Someone looks over the daily tallies, someone receives the shipment of money and so on. Since everything is now actually tracked it's probably harder to change how much money is made without anyone who can do something about it noticing.
As someone else mentioned, some assembly line worker would know jack shit about how much is actually being added into circulation.
Oh you're absolutely right. I was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But obviously there is some ulterior motive for automating this workforce to such an extent.
No, they're simply trying to be more efficient. You know, like all the other tens of thousands of companies that have automated themselves.
Hauling around money isn't particularly difficult, dangerous or precision work.
They're hauling coins around. Drums of them. You know coins, those thing made out of metal. That heavy dense stuff that does bad things if it accidentally falls on your foot, right? Like the summary says it's boring repetitive work and humans aren't really made for that. Machines are.
I wonder if you're the same type of person who complains about government inefficiency and waste of money. Or do you maybe believe in some sort of quasi-communist system where everyone works and ten people do the job of one guy just to make sure of that?
But it is frightening to think about how much financial engineering has gone on in recent years. Printing money is literally no longer necessary in order to inflate the currency. Credit limits can be increased electronically. Paychecks are direct-deposited. It's just bank balances, like you say.
So moving from paper bank balances to electronic balances, with twenty backups including paper, somehow makes things infinitely worse? I mean, you do know that it's all been little figures stored somewhere for well over a century if not longer, right? Go look up the great depression on wikipedia if your history classes were that deficient.
No, precious metals are simply becoming more valuable. There's a big difference.
Actually, Orion is downright sane compared to something like a nuclear salt-water rocket.
It's like Orion with a single continuous nuclear explosion. Inside the ship.
While you certainly can go overboard and start doing it at the exclusion of everything else in your life, well you can do that for ANYTHING in your life.
Your point being? Lots of people do go overboard, some to the extent of actually dying from their disregard of even basic bodily needs. There's programs right now for people who are addicted to sex and probably dozens of other things. Gaming and the internet are no different.
Going online isn't a problem. Spending 18 hours a day online is a problem and that is labeled as addiction.
With such endeavors there is the internal opinion issue: in case of a failed take-off (think Challenger or Columbia) what happens with the nuclear reactor? NASA will have to prove even in such situation the reactor is going to be 100% safe.
NASA has launched RTGs multiple times, known problem and already dealt with.
If the American public will accept the safety assurances of NASA, then the Russians and the Chinese are going to raise HELL about the idea of having nuclear energy in space. No, it's not about atomic bombs - but nuclear reactors can easily be used as energy sources for powerful lasers.
Lasers aren't that useful as weapons and you can use solar panels for those if you really want. But frankly no one would give a damn because if you want to power a military weapon you shove your reactor up on a secret satellite that no one knows the insides of. Do you think the dozens of nuclear powered satellites launched in the cold war were told of to the enemy?
NASA might be able to persuade the American public, but will never persuade the Russians and the Chinese about somethign that indirectly can obliterate their satelites and misiles.
You can obliterate a satellite with a well targeted bb, it's beyond trivial to destroy them if you really want to. No one needs nuclear reactors to destroy them and those are much too conspicuous. Frankly the hard part is targeting a satellite but that's mostly been worked out by now.
ICBMS are a different issue but the star wars idea is dead, buried and decomposing. The budget for that has almost no chance of getting by voters since a single satellite does not cover a planet and thirty cost a lot even without r&d costs.
Because humanity frankly doesn't give a damn about space. Most of those eastern space programs exist for the same reasons the ones in the 60s did, nationalism and national ego boosting. They don't want to work together with other nations too much because that goes against the whole point of them having a space program.
The budget percent other nations use for space exploration pretty clearly shows how much they care or rather don't care. Hell even those eastern nations don't put that much money into space travel but only enough to keep the propaganda value up.
NASA is still by far the biggest fish in the pond and it does work together with other nations quite often.
Do you know how much money is spent on movies, video games, designer clothes, cosmetics and every other form of entertainment? If only all that money was allocated to medical research imagine what could happen. Or do you somehow draw a magical line at where "pharmaceutical companies" spend money but think everyone else can spend it any way they wish? Do YOU donate all your money, except that needed for sheer basic survival, to charities? If not then why do you expect other people to do it?
It seems you don't want to live in a capitalistic society, if that's what you want then admit it and don't beat around the bush. Otherwise shut up about companies acting to fill the needs of consumers since that's how capitalism works. Welcome to human nature. We care more about looking pretty and having fun than saving lives.
Do you know why pharmaceutical companies make cosmetics? Because people want them and pay a lot of money for them. Where do you think pharmaceutical companies get their money? Magical happy elves? If it wasn't for such drugs pharmaceutical companies would not be making as much money and those people working on such drugs wouldn't be part of the company since there wouldn't be money for them.
And the government expert witness, on the goverment's payroll of course, will say the ID is nearly infallible and you'll end up in jail. We send people to death row on little more than unreliable eye witness testimony, why do you think anyone gives a damn how many people may have copies of your ID?
As an aside, please check how much money is spent on R&D by the drug companies on maintenance drugs vs. "cure" drugs. It's not even close in terms of cash. It's very clear where the drug companies interests lie, and it's very clear that over time this impacts the kind of cure/treatments are available.
As I said, this isn't Star Trek. Cures are more often than nearly impossible for currently incurable conditions, especially with drugs, given current technological and scientific knowledge. Money put into such cures as a result provides little benefit for the dollar since the success rate in much lower and the time to market is much longer. It is more efficient in terms of both profit and helping patients to instead spend the money on maintenance drugs.
I'm sure all those people on HIV drugs that got another 20+ years of life (and another 5 years every 5 years due to new drugs) would have loved if drug companies let them all die while they spent 30 years putting that money into "cures."
Furthermore cures usually require new groundbreaking medical research which is NOT what drug companies do. Basic science is left up to universities since they're much better at it and have less incentive to hoard knowledge.
Not curing disease, not curing underlying causes... but maintenance treatment of symptoms, and underlying causes of those symptoms.
This isn't star trek, you can't take out a magical pill out of your pocket that makes a woman grow a new kidney. Hell, you we most of the time can't even make drugs to cure simple symptoms without causing horrible side effects. Don't blame pharmaceutical companies for the simple fact that science doesn't understand most of what's going on.
The job of the pharmaceutical companies isn't to choose the best treatment plan for patients, that's what doctors are for. Quite often that treatment plan involves things such as lifestyle changes, surgery, therapy and so on that have nothing to do with drugs companies.
Most drugs aren't cures for the simple fact that if a cure exists you don't need other drugs. If a cure doesn't exist you do need drugs. If you need drugs then you should try to make them the best and most pleasant drugs possible. You can't blame drug companies any more than you can blame high crime neighborhoods on police for having too many officers assigned to them.
Oh, and if there's an emergency there's a school supplied cell phone in every room just in case no students are carrying one?
Nope. There isn't. The "needed for emergencies" argument is a giant load of bullshit.
When I was in school yes there was a phone, wired, in every single classroom so teachers could easily communicate. Likewise a system existed so parents could easily call the school, whose number they knew, and reach their child if necessary.
No, investment requires the EXPECTATION of growth. Expecttion requires that over the long term that's what happens.
No, investors try to basically bound risk and returns. As you said, investments that fail to provide the proper balance aren't invested in. This is compared to other investments including whatever risk-free investments exist.
Positive return on investment doesn't require overall growth; case in point I think is that the stock market on average beats the gdp growth+inflation by a decent margin. It simply requires that investors have some ability to judge successful investments. The ones that don't quickly go bankrupt and the ones who do get invested in themselves by other people. I think bank loans are the simplest examples of the process, for example if a business wants to replace an old decrepit building with a new one that has lower maintenance costs.
In other words capitalism only requires change and it's simply a means of making that change efficient.
Gambling is different. Appart from professional gamblers and problem gamblers, people only do it for entertainment - expecting to lose. WHerever expectation of loss happens for investments, then investment capital dries up.
If you're going to assume some magical scenario then you need to consider every part of it. You can't use examples from now, when other investments exist, in scenarios that you yourself say are drastically different. Anyway, that's all irrelevant now that I think about it.
But growth is unsustainable on a finite planet.
Like I said in my other post, we're so far from hitting the limits of this planet it's not even funny. You're basically arguing Malthusian catastrophe which has been done for centuries and yet we're not all dead yet. As it's looking now there's always going to be some new technology, some new refinement, some new invention that changes everything yet again.
Also, it's very hard to end up with no overall growth. If resources are scarce than growth will be fueled by ever increasing efficiency in using existing resources. Most likely also by acquiring new resources, like say shoving an asteroid into earth orbit, since their high costs will no longer be that prohibitive. The amount of sunlight hitting this planet pretty much means we'll be colonizing other planets long before energy becomes a real problem. Real problem in this case means we're using enough, think power beamed down from space, to cause global warming directly. Everything else can be recycled one way or another.
And I'm only pointing out that the flaws you mention are ones of human nature rather than of capitalism. They afflict any system, communism was simply an example.
Investment requires the potential of growth in that investment but that doesn't mean you need overall growth. Even now most of the money to be gained from investments comes from loss in other areas rather than overall growth. Look at gambling, overall you never win however that doesn't stop a lot of people from playing. Prediction markets are another amusing example where there is no growth since the whole system is purely artificial and self-contained.
I'm assuming you're not arguing that all change needs to be stopped period, are you?
Capitalism doesn't require anything, all it does is allocate resources. Don't blame capitalism for people's and society's indifference to long term consequences. If you want efficient products then either convince people to pay more for them or take the easier way out and have the government tax things appropriately. Worked for Europe and gasoline usage.
Look at China, they're got a vaguely communist oligarchy and they're currently the number one planet rapist around. The pollution there would probably topple governments if it happened in the west. Not capitalism but sheer human short term interest and greed.
Of course that's not what you want to hear. You want a magical scapegoat that somehow is responsible for all of man's problems and whose removal will usher in a magical utopian age. In reality, the alternatives are even worse.
Capitalism is a bad system but it's pretty much showed itself to be better than the alternatives on a large scale. Or rather hybrids based mostly on capitalism have proven to be better than the alternatives. Same thing goes for democracy.
Human natures is still in the days when humanity was a bunch of small tribes whose hobby was murdering each other. That's not going to change no matter how much you cover your ears and repeat it's not true. Capitalism works because it actually assumes many humans are greedy, selfish bastards who care about little except their own satisfaction. Enough of them are ambitious, intelligent, vicious and driven to butcher any system that's foolish enough to assume they don't exist.
Virtulization sucks at games. The main reason someone using linux would boot into windows is games. I'm sure you see the dilemma.
Just to add so we're all clear on definitions, as I understand it we're talking about these regions of dna here:
a) rna/protein coding region
b) transcribed non-coding regions (introns)
c) regulatory region
d) unknown/junk/other non-coding region
I suspect there's some additional stuff I missed but it's been a while since I cared too much about this.
In my molecular biology classes "gene" was used to refer to a, b and c as they relate to a protein. To be honest that someone would think otherwise, aside from specialized research, just seemed beyond silly to me.
The only thing "genome" may not have referred to was d) but recent advances have probably stopped that trend. Difficult to ignore something when you keep finding ways in which is matters and can't be ignored.
There's a large number of mutations happening in all these regions. The rate of mutations surviving is higher in regions b and d due to the lack of impact of those mutations. At the same time you can have quite a few mutations in regions a and c with no or almost no detrimental effect.