Agreed, he sounds only vaguely like a *real* Jamaican accent. However, he sounds very much like a *stereotypical* Jamaican accent.

You may as well say that styling a character on traditional blackface comedy isn't racist, because blackface comedy wasn't actually a reflection of real black people. No, it wasn't - that's the entire reason it's so racist. If you're actually accurately representing a subclass of people then the potential for racism is limited - you may laugh at the otherness a bit, but it's by grossly exaggerating the differences into an insulting caricature that you create something deeply offensive. And once that caricature is established in the culture as a stereotype, a non-verbal insult, simply removing the most obvious reference to its racial roots doesn't eliminate the racism. The caricature stands on its own, invoking the mentality that created it to all who recognize it.

And incidentally, I seem to recall a number of prominent native Jamaican media personalities complaining about Jar Jar at the time - and frankly, if there's anyone fit to recognize a racist caricature, I'd say it's the targets - people who have lived their lives on the receiving end of those thinly-veiled insults. Perhaps they may be over-sensitive, but that same sensitivity also highlights in glaring relief the commoditized racism that people who have never been targeted may overlook entirely. (I grew up in a heavily Hispanic community, and to this day being called "white boy" or "gringo" will raise my hackles, even in the most friendly of contexts - and I have the benefit of being on the "winning" side of racial conflict, so the name really only brands me as "other", not "lesser")

The thing is, you don't have to intend for a racist slur to be insulting for it to be so - the insult has been baked into the slur by decades of abuse. Just as saying "red" invokes a mental impression of a certain color to anyone with color vision, so saying "nigger" invokes a mental impression of a judgment of subhuman worth to anyone familiar with the words recent history. And invoking a racist caricature does the same to anyone who has been sensitized to that caricature, even if it's done by a nonhuman CG character.

Not so. Typically if you *completely* remove a cancerous tumor it stays gone - though the risk factors that led it to forming in the first place may lead to new cancers forming in the future. (Also worth noting - not all tumors are cancerous - apparently the terminology has changed (or I misunderstood in the past) such that only malignant tumors are termed cancerous. Not that benign tumors can't kill you - a well-contained lump in the wrong place can still cause fatal complications, but it won't be rebel cell-clusters overwhelming your body that kills you.

That said, completely removing a cancer can be challenging, for a couple reasons:
1) Malignant tumors can metastasize, with cell clusters breaking off in the blood stream and "colonizing" distant parts of the body. Often such secondary tumors will remain microscopic due to the primary tumor releasing growth-suppressing chemicals - at least until it's removed, at which secondary tumors may begin growing rapidly. I believe this is one of the reasons chemotherapy is often employed before a planned surgery - with luck it will both shrink the edges of the tumor, and kill off most of the potentially hundreds of other tiny cancers while they're still too small to detect

2) Historically there hasn't been any easy way to distinguish between healthy and cancerous cells during surgery,with malignant tumors often "infecting" the surrounding tissue as well as the well-defined tumor. And if you leave even one cancerous cell behind it will probably regrow. That's poised to change though, there was a woman on TED a year or two ago that came up with a way to bind an injectable fluorescing dye to only cancerous cells* - exploiting one of the characteristic metabolic quirks I believe. So shine a UV lamp on the surrounding tissue after the main surgery and if anything glows, scrape that out too. Currently the accepted technique is to take post-surgical biopsies from several points around the site for testing, and then schedule a second surgery if there is any further cancer detected. Of course you basically have to just hope that any problem areas get biopsied.

*She also worked out how to bind a second color dye to only nerve cells, allowing for much safer surgery around nerves, particularly extremely fine ones that aren't readily visible. Some cool footage for the non-squeamish http://www.ted.com/talks/quyen...

That would depend heavily on the strain of Buddhism. In at least several the part that "will be back" is explicitly not "I" in any meaningful sense. In fact it seems like a common theme is that "I" is an illusion, and thus not only can't meaningfully come back, but was never really there to begin with.

Well, if it was "initial alien assault" or "acute environmental UV exposure" then the millions soon to follow might like the warning...

That would be interesting data, but I'm not sure how useful it would be for seeing trends, at least predictive ones - what with the technological shifts in productivity.

In the US at least I suspect part of the problem is that, as I recall, early last century, during the WWI/II labor shortages, there were certain limits on "head hunting" put in place. One of the outshoots being that non-monetary compensation such as retirement and medical insurance became a standard feature in compensation packages - which had the effect of both reducing worker mobility, and provided incentive to overwork employees since a large portion of the compensation package did not scale with hours worked. That puts us in a position now where it's substantially cheaper for a company to work one employee 60 hours than two employees 30 hours each. A contributing factor to our 12-15% unemployment rate (it's actually something like 30% for those in their early twenties, and far worse for young minorities. If *that's* not a disaster in the making I don't know what is)

Got your quotation marks wrong there, that should be
>...petrochemical companies sponsoring anti-green "science"

It would hardly be the first time such a situation has occurred. The traditional strategy is for the wealthy to handsomely reward the mercenaries in their private security "army", and let the rest of the world burn. Just look at Somalia today - anarchy only hurts the working class.

>You only deserve to receive if you contribute.

I would take exception to this, at least if you claim the current situation in any way reflects that ethos. What do the ultra-wealthy contribute? They take a disproportionate fraction of the wealth created by laborers, and leverage it to capture even more wealth for themselves, while generating no wealth themselves.

It is true that a century ago we were rapidly moving towards a 20-hour work week. But then the 40-hour week was officially signed into law (in the... 40s?), and all further reductions ceased. And we've now reversed the trend to the point that we're now averaging somewhere in the 50-hour range.

Meanwhile, hourly worker productivity has much more than doubled in that time frame, but the vast majority of the associated wealth increase has been claimed by the top fraction of a percent, and what little was left has largely been lost to the spread of rampant consumerism.

Unfortunately, with the lack of need for work, there is also a lack of need for workers. So you'd better hope you own some robots, because we only have to look around at the current situation to recognize that those controlling the wealth are willing to do everything in their power to avoid sharing it. For now they need our labor, and so share a few crumbs with us to acquire it. What makes you think they'll share even that much wealth, when we have nothing of value to offer in return?

Technologically we've been more than capable of providing everyone in the world with a life of comfort and leisure (say a 20-hour work week) for several decades, at least. The problems are not technological, they're cultural and political. Further advances in technology are only likely to exacerbate the existing situation.

I've been dabbling with standing desks a lot, and am getting to really like them, except that I find standing for extended periods considerably more uncomfortable than walking. I've considered doing the treadmill-desk thing, but don't really have the space for it. What I did find helps a lot is "rocker-bottom" shoes with thick curved soles such as Shape-Ups. The instability encourages me to be constantly moving and flexing my knees, drastically reducing the discomfort of standing still without requiring any expensive space-filling treadmills.

>People tend to be quite attached to their arms.

Well, at least until the accident...

In reality though, most rides these days seem to go out of their way to make sure that there's nothing actually dangerous within reach of anyone in the cars. Even if you slip out of your seat and stand up, etc. Sure, you'd have to be a grade-A dumbass to do such a thing, but even grade-A dumbasses getting themselves dismembered on your ride tends to make or bad publicity.

Probably also a generation or two of "we're here to help" medical programs not being hideously abused, as was done in various population-control endeavours and other programs. Involuntary sterilization under the guise of vaccinations? Really? That's the sort of horror story that can take generations to fade, and it seems like every time we start building back some trust among the population, someone decides to abuse it yet again.

Software failures will scale up similarly. If you propose for example that, on any single PC, a Linux crash is 10x more likely than a hardware failure, then they're be dealing with dozens of crashes per day - and that would have to be some pretty stable software. What's your crash to hardware-failure ratio?

Perhaps we should ask why the average employment length is so short? I really doubt it's because the employee's skills are no longer needed, and it's probably not because the employee thinks a different work environment will be substantially more pleasant.

I suspect the usual culprit is an industry culture that doesn't give regular raises to employees to ensure that they remain appropriately compensated. If the only way I can get paid what I'm worth is to get a job at a different company, then what do realistically expect me to do?