Let me tell you something about the free market. It's a crock of shit. There's a lot of great laisse faire thinkers out there lauding the idea of zero government interfereance in private affairs, but other forces, such as reality, tend to conflict with their ideals.
Left to its own devices, the market will form a monopoly. With a higher cost of entry, the monopoly will simply form faster. If there was no government oversight, we'd have one worldwide telco/isp/overlord within about 20 years. As it stands we only have less than a dozen tier 1 telcos anyway. Companies so huge they have "Gentlemen's Agreements" instead of monied contracts. What more evidence do you need. It's a cartel!
Now of course, if you have too much regulations, inefficiency, blah, blah, blah. Great, I'll keep it in mind, but at the moment, the internet is rapidly becoming the private demesne of a handful of companies. Companies beholden to no one. I foresee a future where private company regulations superceed any and all rights you or I have to use the internet in the way we want. BellSouth could permanantly blacklist you for irritiating them in your blog.
I say, fuck private companies. The internet, electricity, water, etc, should be public resources, like the air. So if they want to run things, they can do so under a regulator. Oh yeah, and transparently too. You provide a public service, then you've got to do it publically pal. Fuckers paw all our juicy data, but we're not entitled to get their caffeteria menus? Gods danm plutocrats.
Personally, if it's a choice between losing my own rights and locking children up in special compounds 24/7/365 until they reach 18, I'm choosing emigration.
Another point so often left out is the sugar content in foods today. Modern food is chock a block with high fructose corn syrup. Virtually all food contains it at this point. It's a major contributing factor for diabetes and is something largely outside the ken, never mid the control, of the average person.
When someone contracts Type-II diabetes, don't just ask how much they ate. Ask what they ate. I'd wager the second is by far the bigger contributor to the disease. If HFCS was a banned substance, I would forsee a collapse in the number of diabetics emerging, even without a decrease in consumption.
If we do not do something about it, Africans and the denizens of the Third World will fork into their own species.
I think this line basically sums up what this entire story is about. Educated white people predicting that their "superior" strain of humanity will evolve into a more "perfect" form than other "lesser" strains of humanity. We heard all this before in the great age of colonial racism, and the logic is still flawed.
Let's look at the facts.
When does a species begin to diverge? The answer is when separate populations of that species exist in different enviornments for a long enough period, typically hundreds of thousands of years. One gets two seperate species at the point where individuals from the disparate populations are no longer able to mate to produce fertile offsping. Clearly, dispite over 50,000 years of separation between some human groups, this has not occurred.
To be sure, there are regional difference in human populations. Our species, like any other, will adapt over time to the enviornment in its locality. As long as human populations remain separated in different enviornments, yes, we can eventually expcet to see divergence into seperate species.
Now, lets consider how seperated human populations are today. I can buy an airline ticket to take me to the other side of the globe for less than a months wages. In prior times, a months wage would barely have gotten me into the next country. With improved communications, separate populations of humans have more incentive, more oppertunity, and more motive to communicate, and ultimately interbreed with one another. In fact, such are the benefits of this increased communication, that human communities who choose to isolate themselves are far more likely to become extinct than diverge.
Once one follows the basic tenants to evolutionary theory, the future of humanity is writ clear. We are all destined to intermingle into one diverse population, with no real "racial" or "ethic" groups. The gene pool will be larger, healthier and disease resistant than our current homogenous populations, which are based more on skin colour than anything else. Incidently, most people in the future will have more or less the same skin tone, whos tint will depend on how degredated the ozone layer becomes.
This is so obvious and inevitable, it's barely worth mentioning. However, it of course involves something quite a lot of rich white folks do not approve of, that is people marrying outside their race. Hence they moan on again and again about "purity" of blood, even when we know that people who's parents are from different races are on average healthier, smarter and more attractive.
So give the eugenists the finger and do your future offspring a favour. Marry someone outside your "race", if there is such a thing,
As we pass through Peak Oil, when half of all the oil on Earth has been found, refined, and burned, we will find that it is increasingly difficult to keep the poor people alive and well, regardless of how much they breed.
You make an assumption here; that is, the reason for increased human lifespan can be traced back to cheap energy in the form of oil. This is simply not the case. The reason for increased lifespans, and massive population growth, has and always will be the industrial revolution. Our capacity to produce essential consumables must be a hundredfold that of our pre-industrial societies. Even if the oil runs out, we still have multiple sources of energy to keep our industries functioning.
Cloned animals seems good to me -- if I can get marbled beef at a discount, I'll be happy. If beef jerky comes down even 20% in price, I'll be happy. If creams and cheeses can be made at the same quality for a lower price, I'll be happy.
Except of course they won't. The production of the producing agent, in this case the cloned cow, is higher than the previous cos of simply getting calves the old fashioned way. Productions costs have gone up! And this is before factors like licencing costs, insurance and additional disease control are factored in. Milk from cloned cows is more expensive and will probably forever remain so.
Cloning is the argicultural equivalent of vaporware. All bubble, no squeak. All it can promise is yesterday's quality, today, at a higher price. Isn't this the exact opposite of what innovation is supposed to bring about? I think your rant against government requiring foods to be labeled has skewed your normal interpreation of capitalism. I think you need to check the labels on what you've been smoking.
I work for an ISP providing dedicated server hosting & colocation. Recently a couple of our customers contacted us saying that they had appeared on the Spamhaus blacklist, and were consequently having trouble sending e-mails. They claimed that they had not involved in any spamming activities, and that this listing was therefore incorrect. We found out that Spamhaus had blacklisted a range of our IP addresses (specifically a/27 subnet), and their explanation was that we were hosting someone from their ROKSO list.
Buddy, believe me, as a long time victim of spam when I say; Fuck You, and Fuck Your Customers. Your story is an example of Spamhaus doing its job, and doing it right. If your ISP loses customers and goes under, it'll be one less spammer firendly host. I say, good riddance.
Anyhow, I'd be rather shocked to hear about a Knight of Columbus in Ireland unless he was an American expatriot (or tourist, naturally), as the organization was specifically founded to be an *American* Catholic lay organization.
Knights of Columbanus. It wasn't a typo.
The Opus Dei, yep, also not the world-spanning Zionist-conspiracy-except-with-Catholics-instead-o f-Jews that you might think if you read too many bad Dan Brown novels.
Opus Dei isn't a conspiracy. It's members are very openly conservative and intolerant.
The source shows basically nothing filterable, anyone ever find a way to deal with those?
No they pretty much get in every single time. I was really impressed with Thunderbirds junk mail filter until those started getting in. They simply can't be caught with current technology.
Pebble Bed Reactors and other self monitoring technologies also don't produce waste product like other types of reactor.
Yes, instead they convert unspent nuclear material into PR-atons, a mysterious form of matter than passes through everything except gullible brain material, a substance which they interact with causing delusions of security and wellbeing.
I'm not even going to bother linking to the Wikipedia article on PBRs as it's long since been pitted and scarred by the feuding and petty editing between the various factions in the nuclear power debate. What I will say is that pebble bed reactors do produce nuclear waste. Quite a lot as it turns out. But probably not as much as buring peat logs, or cows breaking wind or whatever else someone decides to bring up.
Quite frankly, I seriously doubt that nuclear power is even all that cheap anymore, once the cost of PR spreading FUD is factored in.
There are decades of data to prove the corellation between IQ and actual, demonstrated intelligence and success in the real world.
IQ measures academic performance/potential. That's all it measures. If good academic achievement leads to success in the "real world" then yes, IQ will measure your potential for such success. However it does not. MBAs are far, far more successful than most academics will ever be, and MBAs are hardly our best and brightest.
living outside Ireland for a long time now -- 13 years since I last lived there, I'm 38 years old.
Buddy, believe me, this place is no longer the one you left.
But to be quite honest, most God-fearing Irish Catholics agreed with the nonsense you describe above, and those laws were made by the will of the (majority of) the citizenry.
I've actually talked with former supposed "God-fearing" people. They didn't agree with one bit of it, and are frequently quite bitter when recalling how they were treated like serfs by the social elites and the clergy. The most common phrase is along the lines of "them fecking priests". You seriously overestimate this country's former piety.
Since the foundation of the State we've been engaged in a low-instensity proxy conflict with our old colonial masters "up North".
Yeah, you've been gone a while. No one cares anymore. I doubt most ever really did. No. The reason most people went to church is because they were uneducated, and were browbeaten by highly educated academics into going in every single sunday. Now they are educated, and there is no way they'll entertain a return to the yoke of catholicism. I say yoke of catholisicm, because that's what it was. A yoke. And there are still a few around who would like to see that yoke refitted to everyone's necks, in the.ie registry office for a start.
And I say this as a son who's home (which I can because my commits go to a public CVS) watching over a sick father.
I think your father would recover a lot faster if you weren't by his sickbed clacking over your keyboard and humming PC. Word to the wise, if you're in deep hack and he asks for water, don't pass him the Mountain Dew.
And you know what, the majority would agree. You don't like it? Go live in fundamentalist/survivalist camp and then decide who is the kooky one.
Hey, fuck you buddy. Ireland was a fundamentalist survival camp for quite a while there. We only recently broke out and I'll be danmed if I going back to the will of the so called majority. Let me put it this way, most of the "majority" who supported censorship, seem now to have shut up about it. The censorship was the brainchild of a busybody catholic elite. The rest of us had to suffer under it.
Yeah it's all true. Playboy was Illegal, along with condoms and being homosexual until 1993. Yes 1993. Prior to thise, people were still selling playboys, condonms and being homosexual, but it was in fact illegal. We don't actually have an explicit right to freedom of speech in this country. In the Irish constitution, most if not all personal rights are, to use the exact phrase, "subject to public order and morality". Oy'veh!
Anyway, it's not like that over here anymore. Long story short, people got relatively wealthy and now have the money to be as debauched and decandent as they like, hence the laws got changed. The current Taoiseach of the country, that's the Prime Minister, is divorced and living with his girlfriend. Or he was at any rate, while still Taoiseach. He might have married her. Might. So no we are not currently talking about a conservative catholic theocracy anymore. Because it was a conservative catholic theocracy at one point. I've got witnesses who can testify to that.
However! There's still a lot of old guard catholic dead wood hanging around. The kind who thought that Vatican II was an opening of the floodgates of sin. They're here and there, usually in minor offical positions that they obtained through their connections to government. "Pillars of the Community" had a lot of government connections over here, mostly because everyone else had emigrated.
Anyway, these kind of officals tend not only to be catholics, they are very often members of some subversive catholic organisation like Opus Dei or the Knights of Columbanus. I believe the attoreny general in the infamous X case was a member of the latter. Think Pat Robertson, only without the TV show. Trust me, these guys are the real pros, Robertson's just a wannabe.
Anyway, it's highly likely that someone of that ilk is running the.ie registry. In fact it's almost certain as they tend to be incompetant misers and.ie domain names are about $90 a year. So on behalf of the country, I formally apologise for this disgrace. We'd get rid of them, but ironically, the smaller the country, the harder it is to dislodge the dead wood from office.
Amen. Too many people sacrafice their lives on the altar of their children's "wellbeing". It's like this, barring some catostrophic screw ups on your part, your kids will turn out fine, They will turn out even better if you don't in fact live your life for them, and instead show them how to lead a good life by example. OK, obviously a newborn will require a substantial amount of your time, but as soon as they enter school, the pressure is off, and you can being to wean them off dependance on you.
Wean them off you, rather than smother them against your chest.
I'm honestly more interested in someone coming up with cheap, long term archival storage. Hard disks have gone so far past our ability to archive information it's beyond comprehension.
Once, I was like you. Backupless. Then I went down to by local PC store and happened by a 320GB external USB HDD for around 200. Needless to say my current backup woes have been solved. If I ever get around to building that terabyte fileserver, all I need do is lash together four of these little beauties and use something like DAR, to span the backup over multiple disks. Or in lieu of that mount all the disks as one filesystem. It may well be painful, but at least it will be cheap.
Most human beings are happier under the boot of some dictatorship or the other. As long as they're in a relatively snug groove of the boot, the stamping doesn't really bother them.
Let's look at the history of humanity. For most of human civilisation, and even before that, humans lived in societies without rights, equality, freedoms or justice. The powerful ruled, and if you objected, you would either be brutally beaten or killed outright. Not only that, your extended family could also be expected to suffer as well.
So with that in mind, lets consider the human "liberty loving" gene, the one that bristles when your rights are infringed upon. Do you think that is now a common gene? Do you think most human beings have retained a strong expression in genes like that one. Or do you think that rather, it is those humans who expressed more "quiet sheep" genes that proliferated throughout most of history.
Most people are descended from a long, long line of quiet, contented serfs. Ergo, most people will naturally act and behave like quiet, contented serfs. You are surrounded by them daily, choked by their suffocating apathy. They are individual only in the individual ways that they acquiesce to other humans who exude the "master" pheromone. Ultimately, democracy collapses under the dead weight of their inborn complacency
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Let me tell you something about the free market. It's a crock of shit. There's a lot of great laisse faire thinkers out there lauding the idea of zero government interfereance in private affairs, but other forces, such as reality, tend to conflict with their ideals.
Left to its own devices, the market will form a monopoly. With a higher cost of entry, the monopoly will simply form faster. If there was no government oversight, we'd have one worldwide telco/isp/overlord within about 20 years. As it stands we only have less than a dozen tier 1 telcos anyway. Companies so huge they have "Gentlemen's Agreements" instead of monied contracts. What more evidence do you need. It's a cartel!
Now of course, if you have too much regulations, inefficiency, blah, blah, blah. Great, I'll keep it in mind, but at the moment, the internet is rapidly becoming the private demesne of a handful of companies. Companies beholden to no one. I foresee a future where private company regulations superceed any and all rights you or I have to use the internet in the way we want. BellSouth could permanantly blacklist you for irritiating them in your blog.
I say, fuck private companies. The internet, electricity, water, etc, should be public resources, like the air. So if they want to run things, they can do so under a regulator. Oh yeah, and transparently too. You provide a public service, then you've got to do it publically pal. Fuckers paw all our juicy data, but we're not entitled to get their caffeteria menus? Gods danm plutocrats.
I foresee a multitude of Flash weeds clogging up the tubes of the internet in the near future.
Oh they can get you the ice. The only question is, will you really want to drink it?
I'm sorry, but maths and people skills are mutually exclusive but not all inclusive.
Personally, if it's a choice between losing my own rights and locking children up in special compounds 24/7/365 until they reach 18, I'm choosing emigration.
Another point so often left out is the sugar content in foods today. Modern food is chock a block with high fructose corn syrup. Virtually all food contains it at this point. It's a major contributing factor for diabetes and is something largely outside the ken, never mid the control, of the average person.
When someone contracts Type-II diabetes, don't just ask how much they ate. Ask what they ate. I'd wager the second is by far the bigger contributor to the disease. If HFCS was a banned substance, I would forsee a collapse in the number of diabetics emerging, even without a decrease in consumption.
Let's look at the facts.
When does a species begin to diverge? The answer is when separate populations of that species exist in different enviornments for a long enough period, typically hundreds of thousands of years. One gets two seperate species at the point where individuals from the disparate populations are no longer able to mate to produce fertile offsping. Clearly, dispite over 50,000 years of separation between some human groups, this has not occurred.
To be sure, there are regional difference in human populations. Our species, like any other, will adapt over time to the enviornment in its locality. As long as human populations remain separated in different enviornments, yes, we can eventually expcet to see divergence into seperate species.
Now, lets consider how seperated human populations are today. I can buy an airline ticket to take me to the other side of the globe for less than a months wages. In prior times, a months wage would barely have gotten me into the next country. With improved communications, separate populations of humans have more incentive, more oppertunity, and more motive to communicate, and ultimately interbreed with one another. In fact, such are the benefits of this increased communication, that human communities who choose to isolate themselves are far more likely to become extinct than diverge.
Once one follows the basic tenants to evolutionary theory, the future of humanity is writ clear. We are all destined to intermingle into one diverse population, with no real "racial" or "ethic" groups. The gene pool will be larger, healthier and disease resistant than our current homogenous populations, which are based more on skin colour than anything else. Incidently, most people in the future will have more or less the same skin tone, whos tint will depend on how degredated the ozone layer becomes.
This is so obvious and inevitable, it's barely worth mentioning. However, it of course involves something quite a lot of rich white folks do not approve of, that is people marrying outside their race. Hence they moan on again and again about "purity" of blood, even when we know that people who's parents are from different races are on average healthier, smarter and more attractive.
So give the eugenists the finger and do your future offspring a favour. Marry someone outside your "race", if there is such a thing,
Cloning is the argicultural equivalent of vaporware. All bubble, no squeak. All it can promise is yesterday's quality, today, at a higher price. Isn't this the exact opposite of what innovation is supposed to bring about? I think your rant against government requiring foods to be labeled has skewed your normal interpreation of capitalism. I think you need to check the labels on what you've been smoking.
Opus Dei isn't a conspiracy. It's members are very openly conservative and intolerant.
I'm not even going to bother linking to the Wikipedia article on PBRs as it's long since been pitted and scarred by the feuding and petty editing between the various factions in the nuclear power debate. What I will say is that pebble bed reactors do produce nuclear waste. Quite a lot as it turns out. But probably not as much as buring peat logs, or cows breaking wind or whatever else someone decides to bring up.
Quite frankly, I seriously doubt that nuclear power is even all that cheap anymore, once the cost of PR spreading FUD is factored in.
I've actually talked with former supposed "God-fearing" people. They didn't agree with one bit of it, and are frequently quite bitter when recalling how they were treated like serfs by the social elites and the clergy. The most common phrase is along the lines of "them fecking priests". You seriously overestimate this country's former piety.
Yeah, you've been gone a while. No one cares anymore. I doubt most ever really did. No. The reason most people went to church is because they were uneducated, and were browbeaten by highly educated academics into going in every single sunday. Now they are educated, and there is no way they'll entertain a return to the yoke of catholicism. I say yoke of catholisicm, because that's what it was. A yoke. And there are still a few around who would like to see that yoke refitted to everyone's necks, in the
Let me tell you a little something about Ireland.
.ie registry. In fact it's almost certain as they tend to be incompetant misers and .ie domain names are about $90 a year. So on behalf of the country, I formally apologise for this disgrace. We'd get rid of them, but ironically, the smaller the country, the harder it is to dislodge the dead wood from office.
Yeah it's all true. Playboy was Illegal, along with condoms and being homosexual until 1993. Yes 1993. Prior to thise, people were still selling playboys, condonms and being homosexual, but it was in fact illegal. We don't actually have an explicit right to freedom of speech in this country. In the Irish constitution, most if not all personal rights are, to use the exact phrase, "subject to public order and morality". Oy'veh!
Anyway, it's not like that over here anymore. Long story short, people got relatively wealthy and now have the money to be as debauched and decandent as they like, hence the laws got changed. The current Taoiseach of the country, that's the Prime Minister, is divorced and living with his girlfriend. Or he was at any rate, while still Taoiseach. He might have married her. Might. So no we are not currently talking about a conservative catholic theocracy anymore. Because it was a conservative catholic theocracy at one point. I've got witnesses who can testify to that.
However! There's still a lot of old guard catholic dead wood hanging around. The kind who thought that Vatican II was an opening of the floodgates of sin. They're here and there, usually in minor offical positions that they obtained through their connections to government. "Pillars of the Community" had a lot of government connections over here, mostly because everyone else had emigrated.
Anyway, these kind of officals tend not only to be catholics, they are very often members of some subversive catholic organisation like Opus Dei or the Knights of Columbanus. I believe the attoreny general in the infamous X case was a member of the latter. Think Pat Robertson, only without the TV show. Trust me, these guys are the real pros, Robertson's just a wannabe.
Anyway, it's highly likely that someone of that ilk is running the
Tech: "It's real."
Preston: "Burn it."
Amen. Too many people sacrafice their lives on the altar of their children's "wellbeing". It's like this, barring some catostrophic screw ups on your part, your kids will turn out fine, They will turn out even better if you don't in fact live your life for them, and instead show them how to lead a good life by example. OK, obviously a newborn will require a substantial amount of your time, but as soon as they enter school, the pressure is off, and you can being to wean them off dependance on you.
Wean them off you, rather than smother them against your chest.
Most human beings are happier under the boot of some dictatorship or the other. As long as they're in a relatively snug groove of the boot, the stamping doesn't really bother them.
Let's look at the history of humanity. For most of human civilisation, and even before that, humans lived in societies without rights, equality, freedoms or justice. The powerful ruled, and if you objected, you would either be brutally beaten or killed outright. Not only that, your extended family could also be expected to suffer as well.
So with that in mind, lets consider the human "liberty loving" gene, the one that bristles when your rights are infringed upon. Do you think that is now a common gene? Do you think most human beings have retained a strong expression in genes like that one. Or do you think that rather, it is those humans who expressed more "quiet sheep" genes that proliferated throughout most of history.
Most people are descended from a long, long line of quiet, contented serfs. Ergo, most people will naturally act and behave like quiet, contented serfs. You are surrounded by them daily, choked by their suffocating apathy. They are individual only in the individual ways that they acquiesce to other humans who exude the "master" pheromone. Ultimately, democracy collapses under the dead weight of their inborn complacency
But is the AC's attitude substantially different to a regular viewer of Fox News?