i) They aren't fish, they are mammals
ii) They have social grouping activity, the thing that separates the smart animals from the dumb ones, and the thing responsible for the growth of humans into the dominant species
70% of US corn is fed to livestock. Because of all the economic subsidy that corn receives this means the price of meat in the US is artificially low.
US meat consumption is multiple times that of the next nearest nation ; even if you cut your meat consumption by half, you'd still be eating a lot of meat, and you'd free up vast tracts of agricultural land to grow other crops.
To expand on the sibling's post about Saddam switching oil sales to Euros :
The economy of the US is propped up by a vast debt. We're not talking loans to banks, or China. We're talking petrodollars.
The de-facto currency that oil is traded in was for a long time, the US dollar. Which meant that nations speculated in it, hoarded it, retained reserves of it for the purpose of trading oil.
This meant that the US printed more dollars with impunity, as long as oil markets expanded, meaning the government enjoyed the ability to spend vast amounts of money backed not just by US wealth and productivity, but the wealth and productivity of the whole world.
Then it was proposed that it would be a good idea to start trading for oil in currencies other than the US Dollar. The US financiers were terrified by this.
If the nations of the world no longer needed their dollars to buy oil, they would seek to exchange them for other things of value. And if the nations of the world no longer needed US dollars to buy oil, they would no longer want to accept them in exchange for things of value, so the bulk of the balance would have to come home to the US to be exchanged for things of value there.
This would cause US inflation, devaluation of the US dollar, and vast tracts of US interests suddenly being owned by foreign nationals. The incumbent administration (or rather, their financier friends) could not permit this, so they made an example of one of the countries that dared to make noises about trading their oil for Euros.
It's no coincidence that Iran is having it's feet held to the fire at a time when it is once again proposing to open a non-dollar oil bourse.
i mean why have 6,8,or 10 children? when you can only feed 2 or 3(without assistance)?
Historic precedent, based on two factors -
* High levels of infant mortality
* The need to provide for one's retirement
These countries don't have functioning social care systems. Your children are the only care you're going to get in your dotage. That, combined with the historic trend of high infant mortality, means that high numbers of children are perceived as a form of great fortune. They don't have the career driven lives of the West that are leading our populations to shrink because we're producing fewer than one child per person. Even if the healthcare systems improve and infant mortality rates drop, there is some time before the culture catches up.
The costs of the primary fuel are paramount - the cheapest way to get hydrogen is from steam reformation of natural gas, not from electrolysis. Therefore that is the source that will be used, because the economic cost determines what happens in the market.
Subsidies of fuel cell vehicles are likely the result of lobbying from the fossil fuel industry, since they have the most to gain. As the sibling poster says, battery electric vehicles right now are suitable for over 90% of journeys, and battery technology continues to improve, with faster charging and better capacity and longevity.
And as you yourself point out - fuel cell cars raise the cost of the primary fuel - whatever it is - by a factor of four. It's still the same dichotomy we have now with battery versus chemical fuel.
You can either have a vehicle that has a long range and a rapid refuel time at the cost of ALL the journeys you make being expensive regardless of their length.
Or you can have a vehicle that has very cheap journeys 90% of the time at the cost of additional refuelling time on some of the longer journeys. Given the state of the technology now, it's more like 20 minutes every four hours, than four hours every 20 minutes. And to be honest, I think I could benefit from a 20 minute break after four hours of driving.
CNG can be stored easily in standard pressure tanks. The carbon atoms in the molecules grant these gases the property of having van der Waals forces which allow them to form liquids at relatively low pressures.
Hydrogen molecules are tiny. They slip into the crystal structure of metals and render them brittle. They slip through the gaps in seals. And making hydrogen into a liquid requires extreme pressures and temperatures.
Corn producers like corn syrup because it doesn't spoil and it absorbs what excess crops they have after supplying the human and animal markets (as does the ethanol synthesis scam).
US Sugar producers also like corn syrup because it lets them keep the price of their sugar high (if the sugar import tariffs that protect the Florida sugar growers profits were lifted, natural sugar would be cheaper than corn syrup - without corn syrup, the supply of US sugar would be inadequate to meet the needs of food producers, which would cause a wave of lobbying to get sugar tariffs lifted).
Food producers like corn syrup because it's cheaper than (expensive Florida) sugar and produces foods that have a long shelf life and a taste that inspires the formation of habits.
Natural corn doesn't get a look in. Most of the corn used for the syrup isn't food grade anyway, and if it was, it would still be inconveniently prone to spoiling (lower profits) and less scrummy than a twinkie (lower profits).
No, because
It would be a harder sell.
* One price for... what, how many years of life? Do you sell it for more to a 40 year old than a 50 year old, because they have more life left?
* That much money for one shot (or a course of them)? When clearly the material cost is so much less than the prolonged treatment?
While the actual cost of manufacturing pharmaceuticals already has very little relation to their price (while in patent), it would be too much to swallow that you should pay tens of thousands for a dose of something manufactured in bulk for
The risk that some Indian pharmaceutical company is going to just synthesis a few thousand gallons of it and sell it on the black market, killing your profits for an entire generation (by which time it will be off patent) is also quite high.
The PR value would be *great*, but you can't take good feelings to the shareholders meeting.
IT. ISN'T. ANONYMOUS.
The transaction log is public. BitCoin *is* the transaction log (and the protocols for updating it).
Every transaction is visible, by design. BitCoin can't work otherwise.
If you only ever trade BitCoin that you mined yourself on your own private hardware, you might have a shot at anonymity. But if you make any kind of exchange transaction to buy them that someone can track, then you can be associated with your entire transaction history. I guarantee that right now there are programs in the major SIGINT orgs of the world that are devoted to associating traditional transactions with BitCoin transactions.
The IRS and many people, it seems, don't understand BitCoin. It doesn't help that the name also misleads in this way.
BitCoin is not analagous to actual coins, objects which can be exchanged. BitCoin is a distributed peer to peer bank.
Why is it a bank? A bank is no longer a store of actual physical objects, it is merely a transaction ledger. Transactions are logged that determine the number of tokens that a given account controls. Account balances and so on are merely a digest of this transaction log - the log is the thing.
BitCoin is likewise a transaction ledger. The rebuttal to the usual bone-headed arguments about people "copying" coins because they are just numbers reveals this. Unlike the transaction ledger of a traditional bank which relies on a lot of central security to prevent people writing to it, BitCoin welcomes people writing to it's ledger, and then farms out the task of deciding whether those transactions are legitimate to the network. Balances are again, merely a digest of the ledger.
A BitCoin wallet
A BitCoin is not an asset you hold. Transferring coins is a service the network provides (like any other bank). If your wallet is destroyed, no BitCoins cease to exist... but the network now has no way to transfer them (unlike a real bank, which can fudge it because it shares control of it's ledger with no-one).
BitCoin should really be BitBank
Your wallet should really be your "pass key".
But you can imagine how quickly the banks would have moved against it if it was called "BitBank".....
BitCoin are not assets. BitCoin is a service.
It's true that there is no difference in security between
* A closed source, perfect, crypto component
* An open source, perfect, crypto component
If it's perfectly secure, the privacy of the source code makes no technical difference.
private encryption can be much more secure than public
As above, if the security of your solution is perfect, privacy makes no difference - public can be much more secure than private.
The privacy of your solution DOES make a difference to other factors.
* Trust
People are more inclined to trust something they can inspect. If someone says "my security system is PERFECT... but you can't look at how it works", my first impluse is to think that they have something to hide. And that something could be a super cool proprietary technology, but it could just as easily be a gaping security hole a script kiddie could exploit. Given the fact that if you patent your super cool technology, the detail of it is public anyway, but I still can't steal it, the bias is that it's far more likely to be that your solution has problems, whether they be stupid mistakes, back doors for the NSA to exploit, or rude comments in the source code.
* Peer review
Good security is hard. Even if you're some kind of security savant, people think differently and someone may spot a gaping hole in your solution that you just have a blind spot to. Open, standard security technologies have multiple people poring over them looking for holes. There are people who get their kicks that way. Exposing your technology to as many of them as possible and letting them tell you what their opinion is, is the best way to evaluate your solution.
It's easy to come up with something YOU can't break. It's much harder to come up with something that no one can break. The difference between private and public is that you'll only get to find out AFTER something is depending on your solution not breaking.
Skype make a pretty big deal out of the security of their solution, but the truth is that leaked documents have made it very obvious that intelligence agencies can trivially intercept Skype communications - and we don't know whether this is because there are back doors, or because the security of the protocol is just crap, because we can't inspect the source code and there is no public documentation of the protocol. It's most likely there are back doors, because properly implemented crypto is not trivial to break. So this is a private system that many people trust, yet it's obviously not worthy of that trust.
So closed-source security solutions are not the best idea, for exactly the reason you propose that they ARE.. if you keep the source private, you keep the security holes private. It will just take longer for someone to exploit them, or it will be insiders that exploit them. If you open the source up, when holes get found... yes, some of them will be by bad actors. But some will be found by people with an interest in seeing them fixed.
is caused by a combination of lifestyle and genetic factors
That's the key right there - in the majority of cases, you need the combination.
As many have posted, some people are huge fatties with low cholesterol and well controlled blood sugar. This concurs with the above - they are lucky enough not to have the genetic components.
Type II diabetes is of low incidence in India, but of high incidence in those of Indian-Asian ethnicity living in Western cultures. What's the difference? In India, people eat differently and exercise more. Despite their increased genetic predilection to Type II diabetes, they don't get it from their genetics alone.
The assertion that it has one root cause is false - the human metabolism is a complex system with many factors. The fact that you can't control many of these factors seems to be a vast comfort to some folk, as if it somehow absolves them of responsibility - but it remains true that you DO have control over factors that by themselves can prevent you getting the disease.
Only a half-wit conspiracy theorist dumbass would think they aren't trying to find a cure.
I think this is one case where conspiracy theory is basically the truth. Big pharma has created one of the most systematic systems of scientific fraud on the planet - running multiple studies and carefully cherry picking only those that happen to produce positive results to promote their new drugs, over the old ones with expired patents being just one of the tricks they use. If you want to see an excellent discussion of it from a statistical epidemiologist, read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre.
In some cases, the new drugs have actually been proven to be worse than nothing at all later on, a fact that the drug companies almost certainly knew when they released them onto the market.
Believing that a company that is ostensibly devoted to improving the lives of people, but actually engages in this crap, just to make a buck, would deliberately withhold a cure for something in order to continue selling a repeat treatment? All too easy.
No, but it does mean that some of you who would have gotten cancer, don't.
As the original poster suggests, it's all about learned response to food.
My daughter likes processed crap as much as any 10 year old, but she loves home cooked food with plenty of veggies. Last Friday she was literally using both hands to cram the broccoli into her face (it was tempura broccoli, deep fried but basically nearly raw with a very thin coating of batter on a large piece of broccoli).
She was brought up with a wide variety of fruits and veggies in her life. Until she started dance lessons, where there is a little pocket money tuck shop, she thought that the only kind of sweeties was dried fruit. She has always received encouragement to try new things, and never been restricted from eating foods because they are "too good for children" or "too grown up".
On one notable oocasion when we were driving home from the supermarket we heard a "scronch, scronch" from the back seat like someone was eating an apple. But we didn't buy any apples. It's my daughter, eating a yellow bell pepper straight from the shopping bag with every sign of enjoyment.
I'd be inclined to agree with the sibling poster I see now as I write this ; you're not just stuck in a childhood, you're stuck in a childhood where your parents did you no favours from a food point of view. But I don't agree that healthy has to mean rough or tangy - even something as simple as lentil soup is very healthy but very consistent in texture.
Actually it's easier to mess with paper ballots. Messing with software leaves a trail.
I) Messing with software doesn't necessarily leave a trail. For example, a system by which your votes are tallied and the results placed in a file on an SD card for collation in a central location, relying purely on security by obscurity, means that you could mess with the data file in transit and no-one would be any the wiser.
II) It's easier to mess with paper ballots, principally because comptuer systems are understood by fewer people than slips of paper. For precisely the same reason, it's much harder to audit voting systems involving computers. Widespread fraud in paper voting systems is difficult to pull off, because the manual nature requires a lot of observers, and most people can understand handling votes in a trustworthy manner. Voting systems based on computers can be manipulated by a single agent, often without a trace. And the pool of people capable of auditing them shrinks the more complex you make them - mickey-mouse ciphers included.
Paper voting spreads trust over a large number of people. Computer voting concentrates it in the hands of a very small technically adept priesthood, much easier to buy off or intimidate. I'm the first to geek out about some cool new method of using crypto, but I've come to realise that as much enthusiasm I have for the technology, I'm not really comfortable trusting the election of my government to it because it's so easy to subvert.
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. -- James F. Byrnes
