I think there's a substantial amount of ambiguity for all parties with WW2 - and definitely for America, the UK and Russia.
UK: Had quite a few policies/attitudes that made it difficult, in some cases, for people to flee Germany, primarily due to prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes. May have known more about what was going on with the camps than was publicly admitted at the time. Chamberlain's failures were huge in the run-up to war.
Russia: At one point in a non-aggression pact with a monster (that also was ideologically opposed in many ways to their stated beliefs) turned around and essentially destroyed most of a generation of their own by feeding them into grinders with an amazing disregard for lives, all under the auspices of a mass murderer who, after the fact, made Hitler seem a piker.
US: We interned Japanese-American citizens. We created true weapons of mass destruction and used them on population centers rather than a first demonstration on a deserted island. To this day, there is debate about the moral correctness of bombs vs. invasion.
Allies in general: Dresden.
Which is not to say these things were *wrong* or worse than the alternatives,, but just that there's definitely a lot more moral ambiguity than most people associate, as you said.
Gosh, if only I'd said that people should just sit there and take it. Then your "clever" response might actually have been on point.
Instead, you completely ignored the point of my actual comment: OP was being rather histrionic in comparing the current situation to the Soviet oppression or Nazi Germany.
Unless... Did the US government murder 15 million of our own citizens without me realizing it??? Did we institute death camps where we efficiently murder millions of "undesirables" without me noticing?
Jeepers! We ARE just as bad as those guys! I stand corrected, and of course the histrionic comparisons the OP made were exactly spot on!
Thank you for showing me the light! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get a presentation ready for Holocaust Remembrance day. I'm sure the local historical center will be thrilled to hear me explain just how my having to take my shoes off to catch my flight to Cancun is just as bad as the previous person whining about how she saw her mother raped to death by the SS! I'm sure there won't be a dry eye in the house as I tell them my tale of woe.
You're really comparing the modern US to Nazi Germany? You're really comparing the current state of air travel in the US to the Soviet Union's strictures on travel?
Know how I know you're a hyperbolic drama queen as well as pig ignorant of history? Because of everything you said.
The system we have right now sucks, but by complaining in the way you choose to you are doing NOTHING to make it better and are in fact making it worse. How? Because with your ridiculous, histrionic mewling about Soviet this and Nazi that you make it incredibly easy for people to dismiss those who disagree with the status quo as over-reactive children who don't have a clue.
And, so that your blood can cool down a bit - people _ARE_ noticing, people _DO_ care, and people _DO_ fight back. My question for you is this:
If you really think that this is Soviet style oppression, if you really think that we have become Nazi Germany, then why are you shaking your impotent, tiny fist here on Slashdot instead of actively advocating armed insurrection? Why are you such a moral coward?
I currently work on several multi-site research projects, and the biggest lesson we've learned is that when you do conference calls EVERYONE should be prepared to offer a summary of what they've been working on and how it's going. Additionally, have one person who's sole job is to get task lists from everyone and to check off status updates on that master list so that nothing is accidentally left out.
Before we implemented that in our conference calls, it would basically be the senior people talking to each other while the junior team members basically tuned out and just waited to be told what to do. Additionally, many little things fell through the cracks - people were worried about mentioning delays or issues that came up with their task lists because they felt like it wasn't important enough to bring up at the meeting.
After, we found that people were more likely to contribute to the meetings in general, and we found that we were addressing potential problems before, rather than after, they caused issues. Additionally, people were less likely to stray from their tasks because they knew that every week they'd be asked about everything on their plate so they'd need to be on point.
Finally, as a good demonstration of leadership, ALWAYS try to have the inconvenient timezone be the one the senior members of the team are in. If someone's going to get screwed with an 11pm conference call, make sure it's the most senior person/people. That's why they pay you the big bucks.
Every time the shuttle went up, the crew was at far more risk than just chipping a fingernail, as both Challenger and Columbia proved. Yet, once those were investigated, we went back.
We're willing to risk people's lives. As a society, we in the US pay a lot of lip service to the value of human lives, but when it comes right down to it, we are *quite* willing to spend lives for only the slight chance that something *might* come from it. If we cared about life, as a culture, we wouldn't have allowed our previous administration to start a war that has lead to the death of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of US forces, and the maiming and permanent mutilation of who knows how many hundreds of thousands more from both sides, and wouldn't let the current administration continue any of it. No, life is *quite* cheap, and with the right kind of drum-beating for a cause, we'll gladly support it (or at least allow it to happen). To say we aren't willing to put people at risk is NOT a real factor in why we aren't more aggressively pursuing manned space operations.
I'm not saying your other points are wrong - just that you are incorrect that we are not willing to put people at risk - we do it *all the time* and while some people protest, most people pretty obviously don't care *enough* for that to be a real reason to not do something.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think it's more a matter of we aren't willing to risk the billions of dollars, all at once in a single shot, for something the average person only vaguely understands. And we elect people who are also similarly unwilling to do that - people who have no vision. We have politicians who will bitch and moan about how they don't want our taxpayer dollars being spent on "frivolous" things like space (despite being quite obviously willing to waste that money on other, often far more abhorrent, things).
If we want to get back to space in a major way - if we want to have a new Apollo - we would need to get the people to back it, to push for it, to elect people who are willing to fight for it. We would need politicians who would rather support peacefully exploring our universe instead of bombing the shit out of other people sharing our planet.
That's largely because "real" scientists have to navigate politics to get funding and have their careers. If you prove an academic's theory wrong it can tank their career. If you prove the Mythbusters are wrong it just leads to a new show idea and more opportunities for them to blow shit up.
I *wish* it were different, but alas - them's the breaks.
"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in THAT there data OVER YONDER that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. Yeeeeeeeha!"
Except you can truly use the iPad for production - just have to use it in a way that's different from the standard desktop/laptop user interface paradigm.
I borrowed a friend's iPad a couple of weeks ago and made some music while traveling around Chicago on the L and buses, recording various ambient sounds, turning them into instruments and sequencing them into tracks. Took photos during the process (and some video) and was able to tweak the photos & movies, post them to a website with the songs and sent links off to some of my friends.
Another project I did with it was with some kindergarteners. I asked them all to fingerpaint for me (on the iPad, using procreate, a drawing tool) and am currently working on turning those pictures into animation to tell a story that their class told.
It's a different way to do content creation brought about by a different interface, but it's absolutely possible to do some really neat stuff (and actually a lot easier to do some kinds of things) with this thing.
It's just as much a mistake to think they aren't for creation as it would be to think they are passive. I made the same mistake you made, then I used one.
Will most people create much on it? No, probably not - just like most people don't create with a desktop or a laptop and use them to consume.
Cheap is also better for long-term sustained exploration and presence. Set up regular supply & equipment drops and you can "easily" keep a lunar base a going concern and have a lot more space/easier construction (dig tunnels!)
I borrowed a friend's iPad a couple of weeks ago and all I did was create content with it:
- Recorded various sound samples from around Chicago - Edited some of them down and made instruments out of them - Used them to create some rhythm tracks - Mixed those in with some previously created tracks to make a couple of variations of a song - Took and tweaked a few photos of the various places I was when recording the sounds - Wrote about the process in my blog, uploaded the songs & photos
Did about half of this while on a combination of CTA buses and trains - the form factor was way more convenient for that than a laptop would have been, the battery was only half drained by the time it was done.
I know a bunch of people who are using their iPad to basically replace several (often more) expensive pieces of equipment for music, and have also seen some pretty interesting uses in research projects at my job.
Didn't get around to playing angry birds or watching television on it, but I'm sure it's a nice platform for that, too. In any case, you might want to educate yourself about what things can be used for - less fun than trying to be smug about something you don't know about or get, but probably more satisfying.
That said, most people probably don't do much content creation with their iPads, but then, most people just use their fully capable PC to "create" ultimately pointless work stuff, play solitaire, and facilitate jacking off.
Probably I would make relative categories of foods. Zone Bars, presumably, would fall into a healthier category than a Twix, but not as healthy as a banana.
With regards to self-medicating with caffeine - you'd still be able to do that, you just might pay more for your soda than you do now. Would it still be more worth it to you to drink it than take a script? That's up to you. As someone who also self-medicates with caffeine (asthma), I can say that I'd still stick with my coffee rather than take Singulair or the like.
So, routinely eating ground beef that's 70% lean is exactly as healthy as routinely eating ground beef that's 95% lean?
Because the routine is exactly what I'm getting at here. I'm well aware that in moderation, animal fat is fine - the problem is that when people *regularly* consume stuff that's fattier, they get too much fat. If people *regularly* consume the stuff that's lean, they'll get all the fat they need without necessarily overconsuming, even though they aren't changing their eating habits at all - just their buying habits.
Back on the weight thing - my point is not to get into a detailed discussion of what does and doesn't cause overweight; it's to say that weight is a crappy metric to use here, and punishing weight (a result of behaviors) rather than directly punishing or rewarding the behaviors themselves, is a shitty way to get people to change those behaviors.
Gotcha - yeah, I wasn't saying you were a tin-foiler or anything, but just that some people have their hobby horses and it really damages the whole thing they are trying to accomplish.
The industry is there to make a profit - they're just serving up what will make them the most money. Right now, that's shitty food because of subsidies etc. They have no interest in advocating for changes to those subsidies yet because that change would be disruptive to their practices - they'd have to invest in research & development if they had to change ingredients, probably in new equipment at their stores, and a bunch in retraining. It wouldn't be in their interest to lobby for healthier stuff.
However, if the government REALLY wants to make that change - and for the government, there really WOULD be a huge economic upside to a healthier populace - then they can change what is subsidized and the industry would shift to whatever the new equilibrium is.
Again, I don't know if that's what government SHOULD do, but if you want to change the system in a meaningful way, that would be a very, very big (but not the only) needed first step.
It would kill the unhealthy fast food market, sure, but I think you would see unhealthy chains adapt and switch to healthier offerings.
People still have to eat, and people are still busy. There will still be a market for fast food - there would just no longer be the price incentive to pick the unhealthy stuff over the healthy stuff.
As other people have mentioned, switching the kinds of things we subsidize currently and then further subsidizing healthy stuff with the taxes on the unhealthy stuff would make it easier for businesses serving fast food to serve HEALTHY fast food instead.
Fast food chains just want to maximize their profits, and they will serve whatever kind of food lets them do that. They have no investment in being unhealthy (unless it's a marketing ploy) - just economically efficient.
Those 3,000,000 people would still have jobs - they'd just be eating better.
Well, aside from the point that I am not talking about JUST taxing unhealthy stuff, the point of the tax revenues wouldn't be to actually be used, so it wouldn't matter if it's going into a black hole or mismanaged.
The point of the taxes would be to make CONSUMERS realize that they're paying more for shit because it's unhealthy. Directly, at the point of sale. You want to buy a Twix? Okay, that's $1.50 - and another.50 fat tax because it's unhealthy. You want to buy an apple? Okay, that's.75, oh, and because it's healthy, you get a.10 tax credit, to it's only.65 cents now. Make it clear - right there, right when the consumer is about to engage in the actual behavior you want to change - that they are paying/being rewarded for the choice they're making. It changes the whole gratification concept - people buy a candy bar because eating it gratifies them in the immediate term and they don't worry about the trouble it will cause in the long term because hey, instant gratification, and one single candy bar won't make ANY real difference, and they can just ignore the fact that it hasn't just been a single candybar but 50 of them a month... So now, that instant gratification is immediately and loudly nullified or modified by a very strong, immediate and 100% correlated negative: a tax. It may just be enough to cancel out the gratification of the purchase of a treat, and to make them think about the longer term.
In fact, I can give a great example of taxes GREATLY changing behaviors: People buying off the internet. We live in a "want it now" kind of world - people make impulse buys all the time. Yet, if you look at the way people have bought since the internet made most anything available online, people would go out of their way to buy something and wait for it to be delivered (delaying their gratification) in order to avoid sales tax. It made them think about how they were basically paying sales-tax as a premium in order to get something now, and many people made the choice to buy online and delay their gratification. Now that sales tax is often being charged online, it'll be interesting to see what changes happen as people no longer have that immediate incentive on their behavior.
People looking at the tax revenues as a way to fund the medical costs of poor choices are still being reactive - I'm talking about these taxes being used as a kind of behavioral goad to prevent undesired behaviors in the first place by pushing buttons on consumers right then and there, fighting instant gratification with instant consequences, rather than the fools errand of trying to fight it with longer-term consequences that people may believe they can avoid.
I know it's being disputed - it's been a big bone of contention. That doesn't mean that it, combined with high taxes on cigarettes and rules about smoking outside of buildings, haven't caused a reduction in the number of people smoking.
I'm an ex-smoker myself, and actually, I think that you're absolutely wrong that non-smokers despise smokers due to FUD - because that implies that there's absolutely no basis for non-smokers to not want to be around smokers. Smoking is one habit that has negative effects on those around the smoker, and I'm not talking about health effects.
Cigarette smoke stinks. It gets in your clothes and your hair when you've been around smokers. It can make your eyes water, cause coughing fits, or trigger asthma attacks in some people. I've had a couple of nice outfits marred by assholes who can't be bothered to look where they're waving their cigarette holding hand. Many smokers also don't clean up after themselves - tossing butts into the street etc. There are tons of very valid reasons to not want to be around smokers that have absolutely zero to do with health risks and everything to do with people not wanting to have to pay the price for someone else's shitty habit; calling it FUD is bullshit.
Regardless of the reason for it, overweight is a shitty metric for gauging whether someone is engaging in healthy behaviors. It's shitty because it isn't evenly related to behaviors (some people can be more relaxed than others) and because it is not directly related to specific instances of healthy behavior. Further, it ignores ALL of the incredibly unhealthy shit people do that helps keep them skinny - smoking, starving, purging, drug use. So, it doesn't so much promote healthy behavior, but just punish the people who's unhealthy behavior + genetics result in overweight.
If there is to be change - like, as you suggest, people having smaller, more frequent meals and not drinking soda so they lose weight - the rewards/punishments need to be directly related to the bad behaviors, NOT to their (potential, not evenly distributed) outcomes.
I don't necessarily disagree that in most cases, people's genes aren't going to lead to dangerous overweight despite really healthy habits. My point was that overweight, in and of itself, is a bad measure, and a bad way to try to promote health because not everyone is built the same, and for some people, keeping their weight down really would require an almost ascetic approach to life that is not practical or sustainable for them, while for other people it is something that requires no self-control. Putting a punishment or reward on overweight is basically calling having a high metabolism a moral virtue and a low metabolism a personal failing, while ignoring the fact that many heavier people do engage in much more self control than many lower weight people, even if that level of self control they do exert is still insufficient to prevent overweight. Therefore, as I said, a better way to address the issue would be to directly address behaviors that are either healthy or unhealthy and that aren't particularly dependent on one's biological configuration.
I'm also for insurers cutting people a break for engaging in healthy behaviors. Like I said, it takes a shotgun approach to make real, systemic and sustainable changes. Tax junk food, reward people for eating well; let insurers give people pedometers and give them a break if they log a certain number of steps each day, or have some kind of heart monitor thing people can opt into in order to prove they're doing a good workout. Resume home economics classes in schools so that even kids who have parents who don't know how to plan a meal will know how to do grocery shopping themselves and be able to read ingredient labels. Give someone a $50 tax credit if they bike to work rather than drive, etc. and so on.
Expand that - give employers a tax break if they facilitate or provide healthy meals and gym membership for their employers, or make those things deductions if they aren't already. Stop subsidies that lead to low-quality ingredients being dirt cheap, and give those subsidies instead to those creating healthier foods - a 64 oz. soda should NOT cost less than a small bottle of real juice, and it should not be cheaper to buy a big mac & fries than it is to get a small spinach salad with mixed veggies.
That's kind of my point - if you tax the unhealthy stuff it is no longer cheaper than the healthy stuff, and makes price no longer a factor in deciding where to eat.
You also bring up a good point about the workplace issues - I used to work in an area where there were tons of chains but nothing particularly healthy was available unless you brought it from home, so most of the busy people there just wound up eating convenient but unhealthy lunches.
What I'd like to see is employers getting into the act and offering healthy meals as a benefit. Many of the bigger places already do, but I could easily see a company connecting with a program like Seattle Sutton (or whatever the name is) to have fresh, healthy meals brought in - whether free or just subsidized or facilitated.
I won't get into the corn thing or the HFCS thing or any particular bugaboo because, to be honest, most of the people who start talking about those things come off sounding more like conspiracy theorists or pseudoscientists. There may be some truth to it, but to be honest, it sounds like people are looking for a silver bullet to solve a problem that's more complex than a few ingredients. You say "in other countries where this sort of content is controlled, REAL results occur" - yet you don't look at other factors that may come into play in those other countries.
When I spent time overseas, what I noticed about the food was this: the portions were smaller and people ate less. Is that because of controls on corn products? No, it seems to be because smaller portions are the norm for those cultures. What I noticed about the people was this: they were by and large more active and less likely to take cars absolutely everywhere, and more likely to walk up a flight of stairs (or just walk on an escalator) rather than be inactive. Is that because of controls on corn? No, it seems to be a cultural thing, once more.
When people eat less and move more, they tend, over time, to become healthier. You don't have to go into arcane shit about corn subsidies - and I think those things are a distraction that often gets in the way of promoting a healthier lifestyle. It makes eating well seem way too complex for most people to manage, so they throw up their hands and say fuck it.
Brewer's plan is an incredibly bad approach for one very simple reason: Overweight is not always caused by poor choices. Everyone has a different biological configuration, so some people who make really lousy food choices are still going to be normal weight, while some people who make fantastic food choices will still be overweight. Further, taxing a potential, fairly weakly correlated in many cases, outcome is ridiculously indirect.
What would be better, if you really wanted to change people's behavior, would be to directly tax the behaviors you want to change. Put a tax on snacks with no food value - candy and soda are, purely, luxury items in the sense that they have literally no nutritional value and are eaten only as a treat. Tax fattier cuts of meat. Tax highly processed stuff. Then shout it from the rafters that there is a tax on these things, and that the reason for the tax is that these things are bad for your health, and eating them regularly should cost you more because you'll cost the system more. Then tell people if they want a sweet treat to have an apple instead since there's no tax on that and it's healthier.
You can also do other things to promote healthier choices - it takes multiple avenues to make a systemic change like this, but I'm just mentioning the tax on shitty "food" here.
With smoking this approach seems to have worked in a lot of places - in Chicago, where I live, it seems that taxes going WAY up on cigarettes (a pack here now costs about 10 USD) combined with smoking being banned from restaurants and bars, combined with requiring smokers to stay outside and 20 feet from the entrance to buildings has greatly reduced the number of people I have seen smoking over the last 10 years.
Now, I am not saying that these things SHOULD be done - I don't know that it's necessarily government's role to try and shape our behavior in this way. What I am saying is that if you DO want to shape people's behavior, Brewer's plan is not the way to go about doing it.
They had an opportunity to get her money - if they'd made it available "now" at a reasonable price (not $3/episode), according to the OP she'd have bought it.
As to the question of paying for the DVD set - why? Because it's the "right" thing to do? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. Corporations are, by definition, sociopathic entities that are ONLY concerned with maximizing shareholder value above all else. Why in the name of god would ANYONE worry about doing the "right" thing by way of a corporation when that is ABSOLUTELY only a one way street?
Fuck 'em. If they wanted people to play nice with them, they shouldn't have done their level best to rig the system to screw the individual.
The Xoom isn't even better than the iPad in any meaningful way - the SD expansion doesn't work, the UI is often sluggish, the dedicated (as in, with UIs designed for tablets, not phone sized devices) applications are scant, and it certainly doesn't have the same physical feel of the iPad.
The specs may be better, but the experience of using it certainly is not, and that is a VERY big part of what "better" means when talking about consumer electronics. What good are specs if the thing performs (comparatively) like a dog?
The fact that it's more expensive on top of that - yeah, it's definitely a failure.
What, exactly, does thus article prevent you from doing that you otherwise could be doing to help? And why did you post here instead of doing that or anything else that would be a higher priority?
You did it because even though your post claims otherwise, you do realize you can do multiple things at the same time. So spare us the false piety, please.
In City of Heroes, it was the same thing - you had to type the character name. I guess my point was just that there are pretty obvious ways to make it so you don't accidentally scare the shit out of 87,000 people by telling them someone is rampaging through their campus.
I would cheerfully pay a tax/buy a license to ride my bike in the city (Chicago) if it meant I would have an honest to god bike lane and police would brutalize drivers who violate it.
(Of course, I'd also happily get licensed if it meant that cyclists who act like assholes when they bike - wearing headphones, not obeying traffic signals, not behaving predictably, biking on sidewalks when they're over the age of 12 - also got tickets and fines.)
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I think there's a substantial amount of ambiguity for all parties with WW2 - and definitely for America, the UK and Russia.
UK: Had quite a few policies/attitudes that made it difficult, in some cases, for people to flee Germany, primarily due to prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes. May have known more about what was going on with the camps than was publicly admitted at the time. Chamberlain's failures were huge in the run-up to war.
Russia: At one point in a non-aggression pact with a monster (that also was ideologically opposed in many ways to their stated beliefs) turned around and essentially destroyed most of a generation of their own by feeding them into grinders with an amazing disregard for lives, all under the auspices of a mass murderer who, after the fact, made Hitler seem a piker.
US: We interned Japanese-American citizens. We created true weapons of mass destruction and used them on population centers rather than a first demonstration on a deserted island. To this day, there is debate about the moral correctness of bombs vs. invasion.
Allies in general: Dresden.
Which is not to say these things were *wrong* or worse than the alternatives,, but just that there's definitely a lot more moral ambiguity than most people associate, as you said.
Gosh, if only I'd said that people should just sit there and take it. Then your "clever" response might actually have been on point.
Instead, you completely ignored the point of my actual comment: OP was being rather histrionic in comparing the current situation to the Soviet oppression or Nazi Germany.
Unless... Did the US government murder 15 million of our own citizens without me realizing it??? Did we institute death camps where we efficiently murder millions of "undesirables" without me noticing?
Jeepers! We ARE just as bad as those guys! I stand corrected, and of course the histrionic comparisons the OP made were exactly spot on!
Thank you for showing me the light! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get a presentation ready for Holocaust Remembrance day. I'm sure the local historical center will be thrilled to hear me explain just how my having to take my shoes off to catch my flight to Cancun is just as bad as the previous person whining about how she saw her mother raped to death by the SS! I'm sure there won't be a dry eye in the house as I tell them my tale of woe.
You're really comparing the modern US to Nazi Germany? You're really comparing the current state of air travel in the US to the Soviet Union's strictures on travel?
Know how I know you're a hyperbolic drama queen as well as pig ignorant of history? Because of everything you said.
The system we have right now sucks, but by complaining in the way you choose to you are doing NOTHING to make it better and are in fact making it worse. How? Because with your ridiculous, histrionic mewling about Soviet this and Nazi that you make it incredibly easy for people to dismiss those who disagree with the status quo as over-reactive children who don't have a clue.
And, so that your blood can cool down a bit - people _ARE_ noticing, people _DO_ care, and people _DO_ fight back. My question for you is this:
If you really think that this is Soviet style oppression, if you really think that we have become Nazi Germany, then why are you shaking your impotent, tiny fist here on Slashdot instead of actively advocating armed insurrection? Why are you such a moral coward?
I currently work on several multi-site research projects, and the biggest lesson we've learned is that when you do conference calls EVERYONE should be prepared to offer a summary of what they've been working on and how it's going. Additionally, have one person who's sole job is to get task lists from everyone and to check off status updates on that master list so that nothing is accidentally left out.
Before we implemented that in our conference calls, it would basically be the senior people talking to each other while the junior team members basically tuned out and just waited to be told what to do. Additionally, many little things fell through the cracks - people were worried about mentioning delays or issues that came up with their task lists because they felt like it wasn't important enough to bring up at the meeting.
After, we found that people were more likely to contribute to the meetings in general, and we found that we were addressing potential problems before, rather than after, they caused issues. Additionally, people were less likely to stray from their tasks because they knew that every week they'd be asked about everything on their plate so they'd need to be on point.
Finally, as a good demonstration of leadership, ALWAYS try to have the inconvenient timezone be the one the senior members of the team are in. If someone's going to get screwed with an 11pm conference call, make sure it's the most senior person/people. That's why they pay you the big bucks.
Every time the shuttle went up, the crew was at far more risk than just chipping a fingernail, as both Challenger and Columbia proved. Yet, once those were investigated, we went back.
We're willing to risk people's lives. As a society, we in the US pay a lot of lip service to the value of human lives, but when it comes right down to it, we are *quite* willing to spend lives for only the slight chance that something *might* come from it. If we cared about life, as a culture, we wouldn't have allowed our previous administration to start a war that has lead to the death of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, thousands of US forces, and the maiming and permanent mutilation of who knows how many hundreds of thousands more from both sides, and wouldn't let the current administration continue any of it. No, life is *quite* cheap, and with the right kind of drum-beating for a cause, we'll gladly support it (or at least allow it to happen). To say we aren't willing to put people at risk is NOT a real factor in why we aren't more aggressively pursuing manned space operations.
I'm not saying your other points are wrong - just that you are incorrect that we are not willing to put people at risk - we do it *all the time* and while some people protest, most people pretty obviously don't care *enough* for that to be a real reason to not do something.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think it's more a matter of we aren't willing to risk the billions of dollars, all at once in a single shot, for something the average person only vaguely understands. And we elect people who are also similarly unwilling to do that - people who have no vision. We have politicians who will bitch and moan about how they don't want our taxpayer dollars being spent on "frivolous" things like space (despite being quite obviously willing to waste that money on other, often far more abhorrent, things).
If we want to get back to space in a major way - if we want to have a new Apollo - we would need to get the people to back it, to push for it, to elect people who are willing to fight for it. We would need politicians who would rather support peacefully exploring our universe instead of bombing the shit out of other people sharing our planet.
That's largely because "real" scientists have to navigate politics to get funding and have their careers. If you prove an academic's theory wrong it can tank their career. If you prove the Mythbusters are wrong it just leads to a new show idea and more opportunities for them to blow shit up.
I *wish* it were different, but alas - them's the breaks.
"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in THAT there data OVER YONDER that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. Yeeeeeeeha!"
Better?
Except you can truly use the iPad for production - just have to use it in a way that's different from the standard desktop/laptop user interface paradigm.
I borrowed a friend's iPad a couple of weeks ago and made some music while traveling around Chicago on the L and buses, recording various ambient sounds, turning them into instruments and sequencing them into tracks. Took photos during the process (and some video) and was able to tweak the photos & movies, post them to a website with the songs and sent links off to some of my friends.
Another project I did with it was with some kindergarteners. I asked them all to fingerpaint for me (on the iPad, using procreate, a drawing tool) and am currently working on turning those pictures into animation to tell a story that their class told.
It's a different way to do content creation brought about by a different interface, but it's absolutely possible to do some really neat stuff (and actually a lot easier to do some kinds of things) with this thing.
It's just as much a mistake to think they aren't for creation as it would be to think they are passive. I made the same mistake you made, then I used one.
Will most people create much on it? No, probably not - just like most people don't create with a desktop or a laptop and use them to consume.
Cheap is also better for long-term sustained exploration and presence. Set up regular supply & equipment drops and you can "easily" keep a lunar base a going concern and have a lot more space/easier construction (dig tunnels!)
I borrowed a friend's iPad a couple of weeks ago and all I did was create content with it:
- Recorded various sound samples from around Chicago
- Edited some of them down and made instruments out of them
- Used them to create some rhythm tracks
- Mixed those in with some previously created tracks to make a couple of variations of a song
- Took and tweaked a few photos of the various places I was when recording the sounds
- Wrote about the process in my blog, uploaded the songs & photos
Did about half of this while on a combination of CTA buses and trains - the form factor was way more convenient for that than a laptop would have been, the battery was only half drained by the time it was done.
I know a bunch of people who are using their iPad to basically replace several (often more) expensive pieces of equipment for music, and have also seen some pretty interesting uses in research projects at my job.
Didn't get around to playing angry birds or watching television on it, but I'm sure it's a nice platform for that, too. In any case, you might want to educate yourself about what things can be used for - less fun than trying to be smug about something you don't know about or get, but probably more satisfying.
That said, most people probably don't do much content creation with their iPads, but then, most people just use their fully capable PC to "create" ultimately pointless work stuff, play solitaire, and facilitate jacking off.
Probably I would make relative categories of foods. Zone Bars, presumably, would fall into a healthier category than a Twix, but not as healthy as a banana.
With regards to self-medicating with caffeine - you'd still be able to do that, you just might pay more for your soda than you do now. Would it still be more worth it to you to drink it than take a script? That's up to you. As someone who also self-medicates with caffeine (asthma), I can say that I'd still stick with my coffee rather than take Singulair or the like.
So, routinely eating ground beef that's 70% lean is exactly as healthy as routinely eating ground beef that's 95% lean?
Because the routine is exactly what I'm getting at here. I'm well aware that in moderation, animal fat is fine - the problem is that when people *regularly* consume stuff that's fattier, they get too much fat. If people *regularly* consume the stuff that's lean, they'll get all the fat they need without necessarily overconsuming, even though they aren't changing their eating habits at all - just their buying habits.
Back on the weight thing - my point is not to get into a detailed discussion of what does and doesn't cause overweight; it's to say that weight is a crappy metric to use here, and punishing weight (a result of behaviors) rather than directly punishing or rewarding the behaviors themselves, is a shitty way to get people to change those behaviors.
Gotcha - yeah, I wasn't saying you were a tin-foiler or anything, but just that some people have their hobby horses and it really damages the whole thing they are trying to accomplish.
The industry is there to make a profit - they're just serving up what will make them the most money. Right now, that's shitty food because of subsidies etc. They have no interest in advocating for changes to those subsidies yet because that change would be disruptive to their practices - they'd have to invest in research & development if they had to change ingredients, probably in new equipment at their stores, and a bunch in retraining. It wouldn't be in their interest to lobby for healthier stuff.
However, if the government REALLY wants to make that change - and for the government, there really WOULD be a huge economic upside to a healthier populace - then they can change what is subsidized and the industry would shift to whatever the new equilibrium is.
Again, I don't know if that's what government SHOULD do, but if you want to change the system in a meaningful way, that would be a very, very big (but not the only) needed first step.
It would kill the unhealthy fast food market, sure, but I think you would see unhealthy chains adapt and switch to healthier offerings.
People still have to eat, and people are still busy. There will still be a market for fast food - there would just no longer be the price incentive to pick the unhealthy stuff over the healthy stuff.
As other people have mentioned, switching the kinds of things we subsidize currently and then further subsidizing healthy stuff with the taxes on the unhealthy stuff would make it easier for businesses serving fast food to serve HEALTHY fast food instead.
Fast food chains just want to maximize their profits, and they will serve whatever kind of food lets them do that. They have no investment in being unhealthy (unless it's a marketing ploy) - just economically efficient.
Those 3,000,000 people would still have jobs - they'd just be eating better.
Well, aside from the point that I am not talking about JUST taxing unhealthy stuff, the point of the tax revenues wouldn't be to actually be used, so it wouldn't matter if it's going into a black hole or mismanaged.
The point of the taxes would be to make CONSUMERS realize that they're paying more for shit because it's unhealthy. Directly, at the point of sale. You want to buy a Twix? Okay, that's $1.50 - and another .50 fat tax because it's unhealthy. You want to buy an apple? Okay, that's .75, oh, and because it's healthy, you get a .10 tax credit, to it's only .65 cents now. Make it clear - right there, right when the consumer is about to engage in the actual behavior you want to change - that they are paying/being rewarded for the choice they're making. It changes the whole gratification concept - people buy a candy bar because eating it gratifies them in the immediate term and they don't worry about the trouble it will cause in the long term because hey, instant gratification, and one single candy bar won't make ANY real difference, and they can just ignore the fact that it hasn't just been a single candybar but 50 of them a month... So now, that instant gratification is immediately and loudly nullified or modified by a very strong, immediate and 100% correlated negative: a tax. It may just be enough to cancel out the gratification of the purchase of a treat, and to make them think about the longer term.
In fact, I can give a great example of taxes GREATLY changing behaviors: People buying off the internet. We live in a "want it now" kind of world - people make impulse buys all the time. Yet, if you look at the way people have bought since the internet made most anything available online, people would go out of their way to buy something and wait for it to be delivered (delaying their gratification) in order to avoid sales tax. It made them think about how they were basically paying sales-tax as a premium in order to get something now, and many people made the choice to buy online and delay their gratification. Now that sales tax is often being charged online, it'll be interesting to see what changes happen as people no longer have that immediate incentive on their behavior.
People looking at the tax revenues as a way to fund the medical costs of poor choices are still being reactive - I'm talking about these taxes being used as a kind of behavioral goad to prevent undesired behaviors in the first place by pushing buttons on consumers right then and there, fighting instant gratification with instant consequences, rather than the fools errand of trying to fight it with longer-term consequences that people may believe they can avoid.
I know it's being disputed - it's been a big bone of contention. That doesn't mean that it, combined with high taxes on cigarettes and rules about smoking outside of buildings, haven't caused a reduction in the number of people smoking.
I'm an ex-smoker myself, and actually, I think that you're absolutely wrong that non-smokers despise smokers due to FUD - because that implies that there's absolutely no basis for non-smokers to not want to be around smokers. Smoking is one habit that has negative effects on those around the smoker, and I'm not talking about health effects.
Cigarette smoke stinks. It gets in your clothes and your hair when you've been around smokers. It can make your eyes water, cause coughing fits, or trigger asthma attacks in some people. I've had a couple of nice outfits marred by assholes who can't be bothered to look where they're waving their cigarette holding hand. Many smokers also don't clean up after themselves - tossing butts into the street etc. There are tons of very valid reasons to not want to be around smokers that have absolutely zero to do with health risks and everything to do with people not wanting to have to pay the price for someone else's shitty habit; calling it FUD is bullshit.
Sorry, but you've missed my point completely.
Regardless of the reason for it, overweight is a shitty metric for gauging whether someone is engaging in healthy behaviors. It's shitty because it isn't evenly related to behaviors (some people can be more relaxed than others) and because it is not directly related to specific instances of healthy behavior. Further, it ignores ALL of the incredibly unhealthy shit people do that helps keep them skinny - smoking, starving, purging, drug use. So, it doesn't so much promote healthy behavior, but just punish the people who's unhealthy behavior + genetics result in overweight.
If there is to be change - like, as you suggest, people having smaller, more frequent meals and not drinking soda so they lose weight - the rewards/punishments need to be directly related to the bad behaviors, NOT to their (potential, not evenly distributed) outcomes.
I don't necessarily disagree that in most cases, people's genes aren't going to lead to dangerous overweight despite really healthy habits. My point was that overweight, in and of itself, is a bad measure, and a bad way to try to promote health because not everyone is built the same, and for some people, keeping their weight down really would require an almost ascetic approach to life that is not practical or sustainable for them, while for other people it is something that requires no self-control. Putting a punishment or reward on overweight is basically calling having a high metabolism a moral virtue and a low metabolism a personal failing, while ignoring the fact that many heavier people do engage in much more self control than many lower weight people, even if that level of self control they do exert is still insufficient to prevent overweight. Therefore, as I said, a better way to address the issue would be to directly address behaviors that are either healthy or unhealthy and that aren't particularly dependent on one's biological configuration.
I'm also for insurers cutting people a break for engaging in healthy behaviors. Like I said, it takes a shotgun approach to make real, systemic and sustainable changes. Tax junk food, reward people for eating well; let insurers give people pedometers and give them a break if they log a certain number of steps each day, or have some kind of heart monitor thing people can opt into in order to prove they're doing a good workout. Resume home economics classes in schools so that even kids who have parents who don't know how to plan a meal will know how to do grocery shopping themselves and be able to read ingredient labels. Give someone a $50 tax credit if they bike to work rather than drive, etc. and so on.
Expand that - give employers a tax break if they facilitate or provide healthy meals and gym membership for their employers, or make those things deductions if they aren't already. Stop subsidies that lead to low-quality ingredients being dirt cheap, and give those subsidies instead to those creating healthier foods - a 64 oz. soda should NOT cost less than a small bottle of real juice, and it should not be cheaper to buy a big mac & fries than it is to get a small spinach salad with mixed veggies.
That's kind of my point - if you tax the unhealthy stuff it is no longer cheaper than the healthy stuff, and makes price no longer a factor in deciding where to eat.
You also bring up a good point about the workplace issues - I used to work in an area where there were tons of chains but nothing particularly healthy was available unless you brought it from home, so most of the busy people there just wound up eating convenient but unhealthy lunches.
What I'd like to see is employers getting into the act and offering healthy meals as a benefit. Many of the bigger places already do, but I could easily see a company connecting with a program like Seattle Sutton (or whatever the name is) to have fresh, healthy meals brought in - whether free or just subsidized or facilitated.
I won't get into the corn thing or the HFCS thing or any particular bugaboo because, to be honest, most of the people who start talking about those things come off sounding more like conspiracy theorists or pseudoscientists. There may be some truth to it, but to be honest, it sounds like people are looking for a silver bullet to solve a problem that's more complex than a few ingredients. You say "in other countries where this sort of content is controlled, REAL results occur" - yet you don't look at other factors that may come into play in those other countries.
When I spent time overseas, what I noticed about the food was this: the portions were smaller and people ate less. Is that because of controls on corn products? No, it seems to be because smaller portions are the norm for those cultures. What I noticed about the people was this: they were by and large more active and less likely to take cars absolutely everywhere, and more likely to walk up a flight of stairs (or just walk on an escalator) rather than be inactive. Is that because of controls on corn? No, it seems to be a cultural thing, once more.
When people eat less and move more, they tend, over time, to become healthier. You don't have to go into arcane shit about corn subsidies - and I think those things are a distraction that often gets in the way of promoting a healthier lifestyle. It makes eating well seem way too complex for most people to manage, so they throw up their hands and say fuck it.
Brewer's plan is an incredibly bad approach for one very simple reason: Overweight is not always caused by poor choices. Everyone has a different biological configuration, so some people who make really lousy food choices are still going to be normal weight, while some people who make fantastic food choices will still be overweight. Further, taxing a potential, fairly weakly correlated in many cases, outcome is ridiculously indirect.
What would be better, if you really wanted to change people's behavior, would be to directly tax the behaviors you want to change. Put a tax on snacks with no food value - candy and soda are, purely, luxury items in the sense that they have literally no nutritional value and are eaten only as a treat. Tax fattier cuts of meat. Tax highly processed stuff. Then shout it from the rafters that there is a tax on these things, and that the reason for the tax is that these things are bad for your health, and eating them regularly should cost you more because you'll cost the system more. Then tell people if they want a sweet treat to have an apple instead since there's no tax on that and it's healthier.
You can also do other things to promote healthier choices - it takes multiple avenues to make a systemic change like this, but I'm just mentioning the tax on shitty "food" here.
With smoking this approach seems to have worked in a lot of places - in Chicago, where I live, it seems that taxes going WAY up on cigarettes (a pack here now costs about 10 USD) combined with smoking being banned from restaurants and bars, combined with requiring smokers to stay outside and 20 feet from the entrance to buildings has greatly reduced the number of people I have seen smoking over the last 10 years.
Now, I am not saying that these things SHOULD be done - I don't know that it's necessarily government's role to try and shape our behavior in this way. What I am saying is that if you DO want to shape people's behavior, Brewer's plan is not the way to go about doing it.
It's still a market failure.
They had an opportunity to get her money - if they'd made it available "now" at a reasonable price (not $3/episode), according to the OP she'd have bought it.
As to the question of paying for the DVD set - why? Because it's the "right" thing to do? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that. Corporations are, by definition, sociopathic entities that are ONLY concerned with maximizing shareholder value above all else. Why in the name of god would ANYONE worry about doing the "right" thing by way of a corporation when that is ABSOLUTELY only a one way street?
Fuck 'em. If they wanted people to play nice with them, they shouldn't have done their level best to rig the system to screw the individual.
The Xoom isn't even better than the iPad in any meaningful way - the SD expansion doesn't work, the UI is often sluggish, the dedicated (as in, with UIs designed for tablets, not phone sized devices) applications are scant, and it certainly doesn't have the same physical feel of the iPad.
The specs may be better, but the experience of using it certainly is not, and that is a VERY big part of what "better" means when talking about consumer electronics. What good are specs if the thing performs (comparatively) like a dog?
The fact that it's more expensive on top of that - yeah, it's definitely a failure.
What, exactly, does thus article prevent you from doing that you otherwise could be doing to help? And why did you post here instead of doing that or anything else that would be a higher priority?
You did it because even though your post claims otherwise, you do realize you can do multiple things at the same time. So spare us the false piety, please.
In City of Heroes, it was the same thing - you had to type the character name. I guess my point was just that there are pretty obvious ways to make it so you don't accidentally scare the shit out of 87,000 people by telling them someone is rampaging through their campus.
I would cheerfully pay a tax/buy a license to ride my bike in the city (Chicago) if it meant I would have an honest to god bike lane and police would brutalize drivers who violate it.
(Of course, I'd also happily get licensed if it meant that cyclists who act like assholes when they bike - wearing headphones, not obeying traffic signals, not behaving predictably, biking on sidewalks when they're over the age of 12 - also got tickets and fines.)