And, Slate as a source for rational argument?? REALLY?????? They're about as neutral and unbiased on this subject as Jerry Falwell on The Ten Commandments or gay marriage.
And you have nothing to refute it. Cite errors? An alternate source that refutes? Anything at all? All you've got is an ad hominem attack. Pretty cowardly even for an AC.
Are you the same one lying about homicide rates in the post above?
...
The shocking violence of prohibition days was only shocking becasue there was so little violence among the non-gangster population. In comparison to the violence associated with today's drug gangs, the violence of Al Capone and friends was trivial. The "Saint Valentine's Day Massacre" (1929) only involved the death of six mobsters (NOTHING on the scale of a typical Chicago weekend these days... and a modern Chicago weekend is more likely to involve dead innocent civilians)...
There is a word for this bit of historical 'explanation' - it is politely referred to as "B.S." Here is a very interesting long term graph of American homicide rates. It shows that there has been a long term (300 year) trend toward lower homicide rates, with two interesting spikes in the 20th Century.
One of these spikes is smack-dab in the middle of Prohibition, where the overall murder rate rose to 10 per 100,000. It rose again to this same level the late 20th Century (peak was in 1991). It has since dropped to half that. So, yeah, the 20's were very violent everywhere just like the late 80's and early 90's, and today we have much lower levels of murder despite "today's drug gangs".
But then there were the 10,000 or so people that are estimated to have been killed by poisoned liquor during prohibition...
... You can't have a business without customers, you can't have customers if people don't have money, and they can't get money without wages or social security...
What we have here is the situation when corporate power, and the power of the financial elite, takes over all aspects of government policy. It transforms the entire consumer market based economy into the Tragedy of the Commons.
Every corporation aims to to fatten its bottom line, stock price, and C-Suite compensation package by reducing the wages of its labor force. It is a rational micro-decision, just as grazing as many sheep as possible on the commons is rational for the individual farmer, but it destroys in the long run the basis of the whole economy - a nation full of consumers with lots of money to spend on products. The majority of the increases in corporate profitability, and the source of the exploding CEO paychecks, over the last quarter century have come from holding wage payouts flat (or reducing them. Increased productivity stopped being linked to worker compensation a full 45 years ago, an entire working lifetime. As the proportion of wages that make up the economy fall to the lowest level since the Great Depression the engine that drives the growth of the U.S. economy is running out of fuel, now an anemic 2.38%, compared to the long term mean of 4.41%.
But hey, the CEOs are happy!
...
At best, the trial would suffer years of delay after delay after delay, throughout which he would still be imprisoned of course, while every avenue of defense was contested and denied, in secret, for "national security reasons"....
And he would be in solitary confinement the entire time, probably with no access to family.
Just look at Wen Ho Lee whose only charges were a technical mishandling of classified information (he downloaded a lot related to his work, but there was never any evidence he gave it to anyone), and was held in solitary confinement for nine months.
And yes, the nine months for Lee would surely correspond to many years while the government "gets ready" to try Snowden.
Floating? The Bering Strait's maximum depth is only 49 meters. Remember, recently it was land bridge. Resting on the bottom, or buried in a trench looks like a much better option.
Because it will be immensely valuable in the long run to be able to move asteroids around.
And it makes sense to start with something small to gain experience at doing it.
And although a 4 m astro-boulder is "small" as asteroids go, it weighs on the order of 100 tonnes - making it roughly the same mass as the largest single payload ever orbited from Earth (more precisely probably about half the mass of that largest payload on a Saturn V). Seems like a good place to start.
Also this is boulder, being a CI carbonaceous chondrite is a very interesting object for scientific study. We have pieces of these that have fallen to Earth, but they are always contaminated. Obtaining pristine samples, and being able to obtain cores, will be also be immensely valuable scientifically.
Nagasaki was the one area of Japan that was heavily Christian. The United States had the opportunity to bomb military or government targets. Instead they chose to bomb civilians.
The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on the southwest corner of the Japanese Second General Army HQ, a base of over 20,000 soldiers, and which directed the defense of Kyushu, which was the site of the planned U.S. invasion in the autumn. Hiroshima was the principal port city supplying this army.
The "Nagasaki" bomb was actually assigned to Kokura Arsenal, the largest intact purely military target in Japan. The unescorted bomber was unable to bomb Kokura Arsenal due to fighter opposition, and ended up dropping the bomb on the only target it could reach with its remaining fuel (Nagasaki was its tertiary target).
So the U.S. actually targeted high value military targets, not just "bombing civilians".
It is an economic venture in exactly the same way as any other gambling entertainment industry is an economic venture.
Horse racing is supported by the people who bet on the race, plus whatever revenue that rich hobbyists (and their quite a few) choose to pump into it.
Sure, for the people raising horses to supply the racing industry with, it is a job or a business, as their position dictates.
...
And it won't kill off the whole normal breeding aspect - as cloning won't be getting you improvements, just copies of what you already have. Even the purists that are currently venomous about cloning would have much to gain. Once they naturally-breed a better horse, they'll be able to clone it for their own use - they won't be back to square one when the horse dies or needs to be put down...
Interestingly, no one appears able to breed a better race horse.
The trend line of winning race finish times shows no improvement in 70 years!
It appears that conventional breeding long ago reached the maximum potential of this closed gene pool. So cloning is not going to hold the hobby back. Remember, every entry into the Stud Book requires genotyped proof these days that it is the descendant of other horses already in the Stud Book. As one might expect for a hobby created by the idle landed aristocrats in England in the early 17th Century (the founding stallion, Byerly Turk, was bred in the 1680s), you only get to play if you have the right breeding. A faster horse with outside breeding is beneath their notice.
It greatly underrates the significance of poison gas in WWI so summarize is as "Even though poison gas didn't end up becoming an efficient killing weapon on WWI battlefields...".
The most effective agents available in WWI were an extremely efficient in causing casualties, that is, putting men out of action, with crippling injuries in many cases.
Just one chemical agent, mustard gas, caused 14% of all British battle casualties, despite being introduced late in the war, and not being available on the scale that the German's wished to use it. One a shell-for-shell basis it was 6 times as effective as high explosives in putting men out of action.
You omit that adding vitamins to flour is routine in modern countries - this was how nutrient deficiencies in rural areas were wiped out. The modern diet has even more vitamins than traditional ones, due to routine supplementation, which contributes to the fact that except possibly for vitamin D nearly everyone gets adequate vitamin intake.
actually they aren't "vegan-friendly"
They're made with refined sugar, which is processed with charcoal made from animal bones (bone char... google it)
**disclaimer... not vegan due to dietary requirements and genetic syndromes. But Buddhist and an active animal rights supporter**
Then by all means you should avoid sugar made 75 years ago, when "bone char" was commonly used. Modern activated carbon, used in modern sugar plants, would be exceedingly unlikely to use that as a carbon source: plant wastes and petroleum residues are the rule today, and the most modern sugar plants use ion exchange resins for purification and no carbon filtering at all.
Nutrition labels include fiber as carbohydrate when doing the calorie calculation. Check some labels for yourself (kCal per gram for carbohydrates and proteins is 4, fats are 9). In actuality the average effective calorie content for a gram of fiber is more like 1.5, so you are getting a little bit of a dieting bonus when going by the label when eating high fiber food. But not many Americans eat more than 20 g of fiber a day, so the daily difference is rarely larger than 50 kCal.
Right, because legalizing something instantly removes the criminal aspect. Look at Colorado. Legalized marijuana and the Mexican gangs are moving in to supply cheaper product.
Citation please? I did some Googling to confirm this claim, but found nothing supporting it. The claim itself is odd, how is there more money to be made in a legal regulated market?
I did find this however. The story asserts that Mexican gangs are getting involved in the Colorado pot business for money laundering since it is a cash only business. In other words, they aren't really selling pot, only pretending to do so to legalize money from other sources.
And why is Colorado pot a cash only business? Because Federal pressure prevents them from using the same payment processing and banking systems other legal businesses use. Banks and payment processors won't take their money or the Feds will drop the hammer on them. In other words, the Federal government is creating this business opportunity by prohibiting normal business practice. If you prohibited any other business from using banks, forcing them to be cash only, the same thing would happen.
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.
