hair-brained

Hare-brained. It's an analogy to rabbits, not to people with ingrown follicles....

Capitalism, unlike how it is portrayed by unions, is not a system by which companies make more money by paying people less. So the capitalism solution is not to have people get paid nothing at a recycling center, but for the recycling center to find out how it will be profitable.

Couldn't agree more.

Qualifiers:

1) it's not capitalist to say "if we can convince the government to force people to use our service, we'll be profitable".

2) if your only "customer" is the government, capitalism is largely meaningless to you (buying favourable legislation isn't a new idea, contrary to popular rumour, and it always happens when it becomes cheaper to buy legislation than to compete in the marketplace.

2) Note that the guy I was responding to was the one saying that capitalism was a bad thing. I'm all for it, because, ultimately, capitalism is all about getting paid for your (hard) work. And I like to get paid.

Is it the government that requires you to do extra work and pay extra money, or is it just life?

It was definitely the government. I don't have to send a check to life every month for water, sewer, and garbage collection.

Recycling takes a certain amount of work. The government may be trying to split it with you. If they did all of the work, maybe the would have to charge even more.

Then they shouldn't have put the tax to pay for the recycling center on the ballot as a "cost saving measure".

Of course, there's the whole "it's been in contact with food so it's not recyclable" thing too. Which probably, before they ever started, eliminated 75% of the recyclables. But that's another rant....

âoeWe have a traffic fatality rate in San Diego thatâ(TM)s greater than our murder rate," exclaimed Jim Stone, Executive Director of Circulate San Diego.

my first thought was "what an idiot! murder rate is lower than traffic fatality rates pretty much everywhere".

The only way he's going to get traffic fatality rates below murder rates is to really encourage murder, or alternatively, redefine "traffic fatality" to not include 80% of what is currently defined as traffic fatalities (which is the path he seems to have taken, since he seems to be defining traffic fatalities as "pedestrians killed in auto accidents")

I'd sort, but I'm not going to sort AND pay extra money.

Yep. I was pretty diligent about recycling right up till the local government decided that they needed to charge extra for recycling. When they required me to do extra work AND pay extra money for the service, I stopped using the service....

If we don't want to save the world because it's "not profitable", then we are truly fucked. What are we, Ferengi?

Simple solution for you, then - go work for a recycling center for free. That'll lower the cost of running the recycling center, thus allowing it to save the world. And it's not like you need the money, right?

try 1000 years ago

Further back than that. Europe was fighting the Muslims during Charlemagne's reign (about 800AD)....

When government is huge and has their fingers in every pie, it creates a great deal of motivation to influence those fingers.

Yeppers. There's better than a trillion at stake every year in discretionary spending. With that much money on the line, you can afford to spend a metric buttload of money buying yourself a piece of it....

Toy makers produce toys that they expect to sell better than others. If there's any kind of stereotyping it is not on the side of the toy maker but on the side of the toy buyer.

So, you don't consider it stereotyping for the toy manufacturers to think that pink toys will sell better to girls?

It is generally believed that the earths magnetic field protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind. Given that Venus has no (very small) magnetic field, this explains why the planet has such a dense atmosphere.

So, our magnetic field gives Earth a thick atmosphere, but Venus' lack of a magnetic field gives it an even thicker atmosphere?

I'm missing something obviously....

when it comes to 21st century things like mobile data plans and warranties on consumer goods americans are getting shafted.

Really? My monthly mobile data plan costs less than a family dinner at one of our better restaurants. Or two dinners at an average restaurant....

Well, that was an impressive leap!

so, got any evidence of overpopulation among humans? Other than a number that frightens you badly?

Since I was a kid, population has more than doubled, but people are living longer, there are fewer famines (other than those engineered by governments to get rid of undesired minorities), fewer plagues, fewer wars. Basically, double-triple the population but living better than any time in history....

I remember when deer overran our area. They denuded large swaths of land. By the time the local governments got around to doing something to cull the herd, disease and hunger took them down.

Was this back when everyone was whinging that hunting was evil and shouldn't be allowed?

Note that hunting seasons pretty much eliminate that sort of problem, unless of course you make owning firearms illegal....

So, last time I checked (a couple of days back, when this first appeared in the news), "background extinction rate" is a great deal of SWAG (Scientific Wild-Ass Guess).

We don't know the total number of species alive now or at any particular time in the past. We never have, and it's likely we never will (until that number is 1). Which makes any estimate of the rate of extinction now or in the past more guess than science.

Without an accurate guesstimate of number of species at any given time, "background extinction rate" is an even less accurate guesstimate.

And with the denominator of (current extinction rate/background extinction rate) a guesstimate, the number produced (114 in this case) is another guesstimate (we don't even know the number of species going extinct now, much less the average number - what we know is the number of species that we notice going extinct).

So, I'm less than excited by this particular prediction. Maybe in a century or two we'll know enough to make this a major concern (note that 114x background rate translates to ~225 species going extinct per million years - it's hardly going to be a swift extinction, except in geological terms).

Or not....