stopping just short of burying our own cable

You're willing to go as far as talking to people? You sound pretty dedicated to the cause. . .

some animals have small brains and simple thoughts and other animals have complex brains and complex thoughts

No animals have complex thoughts by human standards.

Vegetarianism is about the minimization of cruelty and suffering.

To me it's about trying to apply abstract human concepts to animals who don't even know or care about them. But even if the terms do correctly apply to animals, who is to say that slaughtering does not involve the minimal amount of cruelty and suffering? You are making lots of assumptions about what it's like to be slaughtered, but you could not possibly know the truth.

You're not going to make much of a scientist until you spend years memorizing what's in those textbooks that scientists have written and are able to parrot it back.

Reading textbooks has nothing to do with being a scientist. I don't even know where you'd get that idea? From reading a university curriculum maybe? But even if you're at the university, most of the educators you'll meet there will tell you that having a PHD doesn't make you a good scientist.

Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.

Scientific understanding is the ability to apply the scientific method. It is not the ability to parrot back claims scientists have made, or the claims others have made about what scientists have claimed. That's just regular "knowledge".

In recent years, kidney exchanges—in which pairs of living would-be donors and recipients who prove incompatible look for another pair or pairs of donors and recipients who would be compatible for transplants, cutting their wait time—have become more widespread. Although these exchanges have grown rapidly in the U.S. since 2005, they still account for only 9% of live donations and just 3% of all kidney donations, including after-death donations. The relatively minor role of exchanges in total donations isn't an accident, because exchanges are really a form of barter, and barter is always an inefficient way to arrange transactions.

Or you could find a way to make barter more efficient perhaps? It wouldn't really be that hard to set up a "kidney exchange" where a family or relative who is willing to donate but incompatible could put their kidney on the exchange and in return get one that is compatible. It's not exactly rocket-science. It never ceases to amaze me just how far behind the times economists and other so-called experts really are.

This is a crazy idea, but here goes:

It seems like the problem right now is that when we create money we give it to banks to decide what do with it, and they spend it as conservatively as possibly. This problem could be solved largely by making sure money mimics the desired activity better. So what do we want money to do? Ostensibly, the purpose of the free market is to allocate scarce resources as efficiently as possible. So our money model should probably be tied to those scarce resources.

What we really need is a currency that automatically generates a set amount of money for each person. That money should be traded around until it is ultimately used to pay for a natural resource, at which point it would be destroyed. The result would be the most efficient use of natural resources as defined by the will of the population. The troublesome detail is defining the natural resources you have to pay for, and assigning costs to each. You'd have to assess how much of each resource you need, and raise and lower the prices periodically to make sure the right amount of resources are extracted (you'd have to lower the price is there's a shortage caused by too little being extracted, and raise the price is there's a surplus).

The solution, up to this point, has been busy work. Based on my experience, 90% of the work being done today is unnecessary. Almost all of the paperwork being done could be replaced by competent automation (though a lot of it has been replaced incompetently and actually lead to more work), most service sector jobs are entirely unnecessary but provide some convenience to those with money. Many engineering jobs are just repeating work that's been done before (but the information was lost, kept secret, or poorly maintained), a lot of the work that is necessary is done very inefficiently. Basically, the only reason most of us even have jobs is the greed or incompetence of some moneyed person or politician or criminal.

You could make a helicopter light enough and efficient enough to do it (for example see the human powered helicopter). But it would probably crash because of all the wind.

And as an added bonus if you like dangerously rough sex, no worries because robots are much more durable than human prostitutes.

There's still a lot to be worried about on the human side of that equation.

Movies made in CGI.

Just because a movie was made with CGI doesn't mean a lot of people didn't have to do a lot of work to make it.

Water has ZERO calories vs. a boatload for soda.

And yet it makes you feel just as full after drinking it. How come so many people here don't seem to get that drinking soda like it's water makes you fat and gives you diabetes?

What *prevents* people from taking advantage of the opportunities in front of them, what *prevents* them from making good choices? Nothing.

There are many reasons people don't make dramatic changes to their lives. Some of them are better than others. For example, a single parent may not be willing to risk taking time off of work to go back to school, or they may not be willing to move for career advancement knowing it will uproot their children as well. Someone who is unemployed living in Detroit who doesn't know anyone in Phoenix might not be willing to move there because if things don't work out they won't have anyone to help them. A most people also simply fear change in general. They're afraid that if anything changes their whole world may fall apart.

My point is, there are a lot of reasons, good and bad, that people choose stay in poverty. More people would be willing to risk making changes in their lives is society were more forgiving of failure.

Many liberals will tell you that poor people have been bilked out of money by the elite. There is some truth to that, you certainly do see people use their positions of power to get away with running scams, or engaging in risky business practices while keeping the reward for themselves and letting everyone else shoulder the risk. They will tell you this is a natural consequence of capitalism, and that the poor should put their faith in the government to take back what the wealthy have stolen. But in reality much of their power comes from the government, and that kind of scamming is a byproduct of centralized authority.

The solution, then, is for everyone to be willing to shoulder more risk (and the potential for more reward). The wealthy need be willing to provide more opportunities for the poor to be successful, and more willing to work with people who have failed before, and the poor need to be more willing to take those opportunities. If we lived in a society that was a lot more forgiving of failure, you would probably see more of that.

And if you live in a climate where you can produce fresh produce all year round.

Are you sure you meant to reply to my post? It's just an equation followed by an inequality. Also, are you threatening me?! You don't even know me!

If you wanted 2000 calories a day, you'd need just 1.2 pounds of rice, which will cost you about $0.60. That's why this is not a discussion about calories.