I don't. The entirety of western culture is basically a single message: "Don't trust a morality designed by a commmittee." And Japan is known for some brutally capitalistic business practices, bud, while most of Scandanavia is denoted by a staunch refusal to let anyone make individual descisions about the distribution of their money and the risks they are willing to take. Just my.02$
Private companies have always been responsible for developing weapons. The government just pays them to do it. As to why weapons are developed at all, it's generally being able to defend oneself. Security is the second-greatest human desire, right after sustenance.
In defense of the Republican party, here's some sarcasm directed at the opposing parties:
Democrats: Yeah, and handing out free money to the poor people definitely wasn't a stopgap measure at the cost of a long-term solution to poverty. Nor were government-sponsored construction projects, or government subsidies on domestic crops.
Communists: Yeah, and eliminating personal property sure wasn't a measure to provide short-term idealistic gratification at the cost of long-term motivation and productivity.
Libertarians: Well, actually these guys are all about making short-term sacrifices for long term economic health. Their method probably won't work, though.
National Socialists: Yeah, let's start a war to give the economy a temporary boost and then destroy a lorge portion of our workforce in order to pacify our crazy leadership. That SURE isn't a short-term strategy that ignores long-term ramifications.
The Elder Party: No way summoning up an ancient evil from sunken R'yuleh could have long term ill-effects...
Any party proposing a radical overhaul of the current system: Yes, putting a new system in place without regard to previous evidence as to how humans work in practical situations for temporary gratification surely won't have a bunch of malefic effects when actual human nature reasserts itself down the road... (ok, so i guess the libertarians go here, too).
So, yeah, in the context of the united states where we're something like 40% registered republican, I think your correlation ratio is more like 10:4. Stop being so insufficiently cynical.
Not that I disagree with you about media making things sound worse than they are, but acid rain was actually a problem, and the reason the news stopped talking about it was that we did what engineers do to problems... we fixed it. And, the problem being fixed (emission regulation techniques are actually pretty cool. A good exercise in applied chemical engineering) the sensationalists found nothing left to complain about. So they moved to climate fluctuation, which they knew was unpredictable and uncontrollable enough that no aspiring engineer would steal their thunder by quietly fixing the problem while they weren't looking;)
The pink lettering and livejournal format really blew the hell out of my eyes. I already knew that ABC made up half their news and twisted the rest beyone recognition, but i thought they at least were competent at putting words on a screen in a way that would not blind me temporarily... another illusion smashed.
We'll probably survive climate change, as a species. If there's one thing we've shown an ability to survive, it's the Earth's climate. I'll even wager that it won't be that big of a deal: we'll not kill each other over the alterations in the fertility distribution of the earth any more than we have and do kill each other over resources nowadays.
And your figures are a bit off... I'd say nature has killed approvimately 100% of the previous ecosystem. Unless you've found some large population of immortal organisms, I'd say that the number of things that have died outnumber the things that are alive by such an amount as to make us statistically insignificant. Fortunately for us, everything on the planet has never died at the same time...
No, because an object floating on the surface of a fluid displaces the volume corresponding to what its volume would be were it, in fact, equal to the density of the fluid in which it floats. You can do the basic calculus yourself to verify this, Pressure is identical in all directions and P=(density of suspending fluid)*(gravitational acceleration)*(height below surface of fluid) + (pressure at fluid surface). So a kg of ice displaces a liter of water when floating, and a kg of water displaces (obviously) a liter of water when floating. Now, if the ice caps were giant blocks of salt that suddenly dissolved, then yeah, sea levels would drop. But disollution is an entirely different problem: The melting of the norther icecaps would cause no change in overall ocean level, though the increased fluid character of the system might have some affect on tidal behavior.
Woah, I posted something about actual science in a the science section, i feel cool now.
Eh, I'm sure he's making comparison to global warming as in "Any Climate Change Is Obviously The Result Of Human Activity And The Evil Corporations Will Kill Us All" or ACCIOT-ROHAEC-WKUA theory, which is the predominant interpretation of most of slashdot posters and a lot of your political types. No one really argues that the climate on earth doesn't shift occasionally. Well, maybe someone does, but I haven't heard from them yet. Anyhow, since "Global Warming" is currently an American/British idiom for ACCIOT-ROHAEC-WKUA theory, the grandparent is making a valid point within the context of the language in arguing that some studies indicate that factors other than human activity are the primary controls of climate.
You skipped a bit there, #2 is an actual valid point. I'm not sure that the dinosaur bone example made it quite silly enough. The rest are all right, though, i guess. I'll give you a 6 in 10 as far as being funny goes, but be aware that 2 of them are for targeting a political party.
In defense of recycling, it can save companies a good bit of money if done properly, which at least makes some people happy. And the endangered species act saved a couple species, though what exactly the benefit of having wolves running around is when you already have loads of hunters happy to regulate the deer population is somewhat debatable.
Well, the grandparent was blind assertion bullshit, so the responders didn't really feel the need to respond with intelligent comments, sniping mockery was actually more appropriate, i thought.
Though, since you seem to think the grandparent had a valid point, I have some land in Florida you might be interested. When the land values increas more, you'll be forced to acknowledge the mounting pile of evidence that the price of land in florida is rising at an accellerating rate, and will continue to rise indefinitely... man, I actually like this form of logic, never mind.
The problem is that the defense of the global warming predictions generally isn't being done by scientists. It's being done by lobbyists. And the valid scientific work in this area is being swallowed up in the tide of politically motivated bullshit. And since the lobbyists in this area are occasionally actually educated and credentialed, the scientific community doesn't have the option of ignoring them (read: telling them to fuck off) and continuing their work as normal, as they do in the case of creationism nonsense.
Well, diabetes kills people too stupid to regulate it correctly. So you'll end up with a decrease in lifespan rather than an increase it in a majority of the human population...
It depends on how much we come to rely on gene therapy in medicine. If a large portion of treatments require the formulation of gene therapy viruses, then we'll find a way to mass-produce them cheaply, like everything else. If this is the only thing anyone ever wants to do with it, yeah, it'll probably stay expensive a long time. As for modifying human genes before birth, it's going to be a long, long time before the various regulatory agencies let that one happen.
Well, actually men are better drivers AND worse drivers than females, statistically speaking. But bad drivers cost more than excellent drivers save, so on average we get screwed on damages.
Yeah, the point of sexual reproduction is to have a variant population and a stable population: the variant population drives adaptation, the stable population provides an anchor which keeps the species coherent. It's a good system, I think, though I guess god doesn't really need my approval.
It helps that the entire concept of intelligence is somewhere between simply undefined and completely manufactured from a series of pipe-dreams, and thus pretty much anything can be said about it without being wrong. Some female assholes exploited this in the 90s to claim women were smarter than men, and now some male assholes have exploited it to claim the reverse. It's not really any more complicated than that. Your favoritism theory is completely trivial, and implicit in the statement 'intelligence test' due to the very nature of the beast.
They aren't. Any better at reading people, that is. I've known some women who believed that old myth, and, no matter how much trouble it got them in when they were completely wrong in their interpretations, they (much to my amusement) somehow managed to cling to the belief. I never quite figured that one out, I think it's something like creationism... there's always a way to bend things into 'I was right all along'.
"they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level" -- nope. First, body-reading is not half as subtle as you make it out to be, and secondly, it's a matter of training rather than innate ability, and most women are pretty bad at it. In older people, especially in the southern united states, there's a difference in this respect between men and women because the techniques were an explicitly included part of a females' education, but not necessarily the males'. In the recent couple of generations, though, it seems that a good 90% of both populations have recieved no training at all, and as a result are pretty clueless.
Yeah, kind of weird that the guy wasn't current on his vaccinations if he was a business traveller. Could have just been a vacationer,/. effect prevented me from RTFA and finding out, and i'm too lazy to google.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't. The entirety of western culture is basically a single message: "Don't trust a morality designed by a commmittee." And Japan is known for some brutally capitalistic business practices, bud, while most of Scandanavia is denoted by a staunch refusal to let anyone make individual descisions about the distribution of their money and the risks they are willing to take. Just my .02$
Private companies have always been responsible for developing weapons. The government just pays them to do it. As to why weapons are developed at all, it's generally being able to defend oneself. Security is the second-greatest human desire, right after sustenance.
So you're arguing that we should just kill people, and it would be... safer? Yeah, ok, I officially give up on slashdot.
Wait, why would I drink coffee that wasn't black? I swear, I'm the only sane person on this planet...
In defense of the Republican party, here's some sarcasm directed at the opposing parties:
Democrats: Yeah, and handing out free money to the poor people definitely wasn't a stopgap measure at the cost of a long-term solution to poverty. Nor were government-sponsored construction projects, or government subsidies on domestic crops.
Communists: Yeah, and eliminating personal property sure wasn't a measure to provide short-term idealistic gratification at the cost of long-term motivation and productivity.
Libertarians: Well, actually these guys are all about making short-term sacrifices for long term economic health. Their method probably won't work, though.
National Socialists: Yeah, let's start a war to give the economy a temporary boost and then destroy a lorge portion of our workforce in order to pacify our crazy leadership. That SURE isn't a short-term strategy that ignores long-term ramifications.
The Elder Party: No way summoning up an ancient evil from sunken R'yuleh could have long term ill-effects...
Any party proposing a radical overhaul of the current system: Yes, putting a new system in place without regard to previous evidence as to how humans work in practical situations for temporary gratification surely won't have a bunch of malefic effects when actual human nature reasserts itself down the road... (ok, so i guess the libertarians go here, too).
So, yeah, in the context of the united states where we're something like 40% registered republican, I think your correlation ratio is more like 10:4. Stop being so insufficiently cynical.
Not that I disagree with you about media making things sound worse than they are, but acid rain was actually a problem, and the reason the news stopped talking about it was that we did what engineers do to problems... we fixed it. And, the problem being fixed (emission regulation techniques are actually pretty cool. A good exercise in applied chemical engineering) the sensationalists found nothing left to complain about. So they moved to climate fluctuation, which they knew was unpredictable and uncontrollable enough that no aspiring engineer would steal their thunder by quietly fixing the problem while they weren't looking ;)
The pink lettering and livejournal format really blew the hell out of my eyes. I already knew that ABC made up half their news and twisted the rest beyone recognition, but i thought they at least were competent at putting words on a screen in a way that would not blind me temporarily... another illusion smashed.
We'll probably survive climate change, as a species. If there's one thing we've shown an ability to survive, it's the Earth's climate. I'll even wager that it won't be that big of a deal: we'll not kill each other over the alterations in the fertility distribution of the earth any more than we have and do kill each other over resources nowadays.
And your figures are a bit off... I'd say nature has killed approvimately 100% of the previous ecosystem. Unless you've found some large population of immortal organisms, I'd say that the number of things that have died outnumber the things that are alive by such an amount as to make us statistically insignificant. Fortunately for us, everything on the planet has never died at the same time...
No, because an object floating on the surface of a fluid displaces the volume corresponding to what its volume would be were it, in fact, equal to the density of the fluid in which it floats. You can do the basic calculus yourself to verify this, Pressure is identical in all directions and P=(density of suspending fluid)*(gravitational acceleration)*(height below surface of fluid) + (pressure at fluid surface). So a kg of ice displaces a liter of water when floating, and a kg of water displaces (obviously) a liter of water when floating. Now, if the ice caps were giant blocks of salt that suddenly dissolved, then yeah, sea levels would drop. But disollution is an entirely different problem: The melting of the norther icecaps would cause no change in overall ocean level, though the increased fluid character of the system might have some affect on tidal behavior.
Woah, I posted something about actual science in a the science section, i feel cool now.
Eh, I'm sure he's making comparison to global warming as in "Any Climate Change Is Obviously The Result Of Human Activity And The Evil Corporations Will Kill Us All" or ACCIOT-ROHAEC-WKUA theory, which is the predominant interpretation of most of slashdot posters and a lot of your political types. No one really argues that the climate on earth doesn't shift occasionally. Well, maybe someone does, but I haven't heard from them yet. Anyhow, since "Global Warming" is currently an American/British idiom for ACCIOT-ROHAEC-WKUA theory, the grandparent is making a valid point within the context of the language in arguing that some studies indicate that factors other than human activity are the primary controls of climate.
OK, that was probably redundant, but whatever.
You skipped a bit there, #2 is an actual valid point. I'm not sure that the dinosaur bone example made it quite silly enough. The rest are all right, though, i guess. I'll give you a 6 in 10 as far as being funny goes, but be aware that 2 of them are for targeting a political party.
In defense of recycling, it can save companies a good bit of money if done properly, which at least makes some people happy. And the endangered species act saved a couple species, though what exactly the benefit of having wolves running around is when you already have loads of hunters happy to regulate the deer population is somewhat debatable.
Well, the grandparent was blind assertion bullshit, so the responders didn't really feel the need to respond with intelligent comments, sniping mockery was actually more appropriate, i thought.
Though, since you seem to think the grandparent had a valid point, I have some land in Florida you might be interested. When the land values increas more, you'll be forced to acknowledge the mounting pile of evidence that the price of land in florida is rising at an accellerating rate, and will continue to rise indefinitely... man, I actually like this form of logic, never mind.
Yeah, I know. Damn that global warming, life was much better in the south before we had hurricanes...
... I wonder if the sarcasm will sink in, or will i recieve an inappropriate mod like parent? I'm thinking 'informative', how about you guys?
The problem is that the defense of the global warming predictions generally isn't being done by scientists. It's being done by lobbyists. And the valid scientific work in this area is being swallowed up in the tide of politically motivated bullshit. And since the lobbyists in this area are occasionally actually educated and credentialed, the scientific community doesn't have the option of ignoring them (read: telling them to fuck off) and continuing their work as normal, as they do in the case of creationism nonsense.
Well, diabetes kills people too stupid to regulate it correctly. So you'll end up with a decrease in lifespan rather than an increase it in a majority of the human population...
It depends on how much we come to rely on gene therapy in medicine. If a large portion of treatments require the formulation of gene therapy viruses, then we'll find a way to mass-produce them cheaply, like everything else. If this is the only thing anyone ever wants to do with it, yeah, it'll probably stay expensive a long time. As for modifying human genes before birth, it's going to be a long, long time before the various regulatory agencies let that one happen.
I meet your unreferenced assertion and raise you a referenced BBC article. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4028137.stm
Sorry if my slashdotML is sloppy. Anyhow, I'm thinking you're wrong on this one.
That's... a completely reasonable conclusion to a legal dispute. Who are these people, and what have they done with western legal tradition?
Well, actually men are better drivers AND worse drivers than females, statistically speaking. But bad drivers cost more than excellent drivers save, so on average we get screwed on damages.
Yeah, the point of sexual reproduction is to have a variant population and a stable population: the variant population drives adaptation, the stable population provides an anchor which keeps the species coherent. It's a good system, I think, though I guess god doesn't really need my approval.
It helps that the entire concept of intelligence is somewhere between simply undefined and completely manufactured from a series of pipe-dreams, and thus pretty much anything can be said about it without being wrong. Some female assholes exploited this in the 90s to claim women were smarter than men, and now some male assholes have exploited it to claim the reverse. It's not really any more complicated than that. Your favoritism theory is completely trivial, and implicit in the statement 'intelligence test' due to the very nature of the beast.
They aren't. Any better at reading people, that is. I've known some women who believed that old myth, and, no matter how much trouble it got them in when they were completely wrong in their interpretations, they (much to my amusement) somehow managed to cling to the belief. I never quite figured that one out, I think it's something like creationism... there's always a way to bend things into 'I was right all along'.
"they (the women) are used to being easily able to pick up these subtle hints themselves at a subconscious level" -- nope. First, body-reading is not half as subtle as you make it out to be, and secondly, it's a matter of training rather than innate ability, and most women are pretty bad at it. In older people, especially in the southern united states, there's a difference in this respect between men and women because the techniques were an explicitly included part of a females' education, but not necessarily the males'. In the recent couple of generations, though, it seems that a good 90% of both populations have recieved no training at all, and as a result are pretty clueless.
Yeah, kind of weird that the guy wasn't current on his vaccinations if he was a business traveller. Could have just been a vacationer, /. effect prevented me from RTFA and finding out, and i'm too lazy to google.