I use about 10kWh per month. There are lots of things I could do to make things more efficient still like more efficient devices, better insulation etc.

I have multiple computers that are always on, refrigerator, stove, oven, water heater, furnace, AC etc. I also spend a fair bit of each day at home (studying, working etc).

Either I am insanely low or that poll is designed for people that leave their AC on full blast with the windows open in the summer.

I only know it from class which means that it could be wrong. However my professors emphasized that we have special enzymes designed to change a trans to cis linkage but only at certain locations. That is just due to the size of these molecules and what our enzymes can do. If a trans connection is somewhere else then the enzyme does not fit right and doesn't break it. However since those lipids can still be broken on their other cis links they can be broken up small enough that an enzyme to put them into a cholesterol. This can end up with the trans part getting stuck in the enzyme and your cell destroying that enzyme or it could end up in the cholesterol and malformed which leads to damage.

I wish I knew of an article though because that would make this much more believable. All I really have is the information from professors and my knowledge of how cells operate so the actual mechanism is mostly just reasoned out so it could be entirely wrong.

Your body has facilities in it to process burning plant matter. To remove a lot of what it does. It is stupid to do it but our evolution does give us some protection against it. However we don't have adaptations to deal with those modern trans-fats. I am only talking about the artificial ones, not the natural ones. We have enzymes designed to break trans-fat linkages at specific points in a chain, they ONLY work at those specific points. So natural trans-fats we don't have a problem with. The artificial ones would be okay if they had their cross links at the same location but they don't. As a result we can't process them correctly and that leads to a lot of problems.

This is not in any way like smoking. Good on the FDA for regulating them.

There are some naturally occurring tranfs-fats that our bodies have enzymes to deal wit (like in milk) and those are no problem at all. The problem is with the artificial trans-fats. The issue is when there is a trans link where your body does not have an enzyme that can break that link. It leads to strange problems like malformed cholesterol (which you need to live) and ends up causing things like arterial damage and plaques.

I do agree with the FDA dealing with foods that our bodies just can not process. This is not like alcohol where too much causes damage, our bodies can deal with smaller amounts of alcohol just fine and break it down. Some of these trans-fats we just have no natural way to break them down at all. As such they get stuck in places, have to be removed by other processes that don't always work, sometimes get incorporated into other things incorrectly etc.

However it looks like the FDA is making the right choice. They seem to only be going after the types of trans-fats that our bodies can't process.

Amazon seems to use both. Sometimes it starts with the flash player and sometimes a silverlight player. I have not figured out any pattern to it so I suspect it is some kind of a test. The silverlight player though works MUCH better than the flash player does. This is true for netflix also.

I would say that all the presidents have been getting better at it. I would imagine our next one will be even better at it. A large part of the problem is our 24 hour news cycle. They are always jumping on the next new thing. Nixon had to deal with watergate for a long time. Current presidents only have to give lib service to the issue for about a week at most before the public is on to another issue and they forget the previous one. As a result no momentum is created and maintained to really do anything. It is wrong and it is evil but geeze it is hard as hell to fight.

Just trying to deal with things on a state and city level are hard enough much less dealing with the federal level. I wish things were not this way and that there was a better way to change this but so far I don't have any real ideas to fix it. That doesn't mean I will stop trying but I also have to realize how large the problem is.

You absolutely should try and do something to stop it. My point is that the parent comment had an extremely rosy view of this country and how much it followed the constitution which was NOT true.

Just look at the abuses of J Edgar Hoover with the FBI to see that warrant-less wiretaps did occur and were used to abuse specific people. Sure it was not on the scale we have not but that is a difference in scale not in kind.

One of the biggest problems I see is actually with citzens united ruling. In my state many people worked for a long time to get laws changed regarding campaign finance, state budget etc and with a single ruling the supreme court wiped that out. In the very next election almost all the officials were pro fracking since those companies outspent everyone else by a landside. How do you really get good people in office that do what the voters want when elections are almost purely defined by money and under citizen's united corporations can spend unlimited funds on elections?

My city even voted to start its own renewable power system for a lot of reasons. The local power company is spending more than my city is worth to fight it. They managed to spend enough money to get a new ballot issue put on that would basically stop the process and most people polled that signed that ballot measure thought it was to help the city create its own utility not destroy it. They did not even realize that the current power company was behind it. How do you really fight against corporations on that scale? If you can't fight those corporations how can you get any change in the government?

I try to view the world as it is not as what I want it to be. Only through seeing what is out there and accepting the way the world is can you figure out how to change it. In the 70s the dirty laundry was better kept away from the public but this country still did not follow the constitution and value freedom, it only claimed to.

I just find it strange that there is anyone (other than those doing the searches) that supports warrant-less searches and secret evidence.

How can you have anything remotely like an honest court if you can't see all the evidence against you and how it was obtained?

Hmm humans with guns vs drones .....

Somehow I don't see the 2nd amendment as being very useful. Sorry but its time has passed. It can't protect you against the government or each other.

I am pretty sure our leaders have been ignoring the constitution for over 100 years. Just because you did not notice that it was corrupted and ignored when you came here in the 1970s does not change that.

Warrant-less wiretaps is certainly a very old thing.

I don't think that Obama has been any better or worse than previous presidents at following the constitution.

They will be held accountable to shareholders where they will be given a huge bonus for doing this. :(

As for being accountable to us or to the laws they broke? Not a chance. I give better odds on Santa Claus existing than these guys being actually held accountable to a court.

For drug companies this is actually extremely bad. Amgen and Bayer have spent billions trying to replicate drugs that just don't work.

For a long time I just blamed the pharmaceutical companies for why so many "cures" reported in research never made it to production. I thought they were just out for a profit and had no interest in cures. However based on some recent experience this is definitely not true for all of these companies. Some of them have tried very hard to bring these cures to market and spent billions of dollars trying to do it. The problem is that it turns out nearly all of these "cures" are just false. They can not be replicated to any degree.

This kind of behavior by scientists is also driving up the costs of healthcare. These companies continue to try to bring promising research to market but the success is so low that it drives up the costs of the drugs they do manage to make.

I have even worked with some researchers that just had no idea about statistical methods. They had never had any education on the subject. As a result their conclusions were worth as much as the paper they printed it on. The problem is that at least some of them really thought their data was good and showed what they wanted to show. Far too many scientists do NOT have the statistical training required of engineers and while it would help the field a lot I doubt they will do it because that level of math would cut out far too many people for the schools to allow that.

I don't really see a way to fix this unfortunately. If you change the incentive system to reward checking other peoples results you will get a bunch of simple and obvious papers that check something else. If there is a solution to this I don't really know what it looks like but we need to find it because this is seriously hurting the rest of the society and it makes it very hard for the actual legitimate scientists to spread real research that helps us all.

I like identifying this stuff, quantifying it and maybe even finding temporary ways to control how it works. However I would not recommend actually permanently changing it.

It is strange because some of this research I don't really want reported to the general public because they don't have the scientific understanding for it but they are willing to leap to an idea and demand it be done. There are some genes that seem likely to be tied to male homosexuality however those same genes are also tied to female fertility. I have seen some people talking about how we should "cure" homosexuals by fixing that gene. What I worry about is that a group could get enough power to try and actually do that. The problem is that we could also end up sterilizing people treated which could be catastrophically bad.

I just see so many people as misusing research to further their own ideological ends. We need to do this research, we need to understand why stuff happens. We need to know why as a mother has more male children epigenetic markers get set on further male children to change gene expression. There is a LOT we can learn from that. I just don't want to see that research abused. I wish we could get rid of this idiotic idea of XX=female, XY = male. Gender and sex are NOT even close to that simple.

On the plus side Toronto is a much nicer city that Chicago.

McDonalds should have been nailed to the wall even worse for what they had done. The coffee was not just hot. It was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns within a few seconds. They had dealt with a lot of complaints from it for quite a while before that.

You should probably read up a bit more on the hot coffee incident before just taking McDonalds side. They had some very good PR companies do a lot of work to blame the victim on that one.

Everyone is aware that hot coffee is hot but if you spilled coffee from any other store on yourself you would not have 3rd or even 2nd degree burns. That is the difference.