What is it with these anti-science hippies, quoting scientists, instead of trusting in corporations? We only produce about twice the amount of food needed to feed everyone in the world, so, clearly, we need to bring food production more tightly under the control of a tiny number of gigantic agribusinesses, in order to eliminate hunger.

That's my last line of psychological defense.

Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.

Hunger and poverty are political weapons.

I was beginning to think that the Democrats maybe weren't so bad, and maybe I should reconsider my stance of refusing to vote for them. Then I was in a bookstore, and saw Madeline Albrights lich-like grimace on a book cover, and I remembered.

Look at a globe that shows elevations, and notice how there's a nearly continuous belt of plains around the northern hemisphere, that generally coincides with the range of latitudes with a range of temperatures optimal for growing grains. That's where the large-scale industrialized agriculture that feeds most of the human race occurs.

A global warming trend would shift that range of latitudes with optimal temperatures northward, where there is significantly less terrain suitable for industrialized agriculture. This would mean a significant reduction in agricultural production, and thus to famine and violent conflicts for control of food supplies. Humans probably wouldn't go extinct, but it would certainly be a tremendous disaster.

It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.

I only saw a few episodes. I believe the series, in a nutshell, was summed up when the chief of staff of a ministry is discussing the new minister's ostensible policies with another career civil servant.

"Open government? That's a contradiction in terms!"

I suppose my response wasn't as direct as I thought it was. I do think I am basically agreeing with your point.

I was objecting to the common, "This will teach you to be tough, which is good for you in the long run", which I thought I read implied in tbird81's comment. Though that may be a misreading of tbird81's comment, on reflection.

The first stage of the bully's attack was encircling the victim with his pack. So, no, putting the bully down was never a possibility.

That's already a significant improvement.

Furthermore, in my experience of bullying, the bullies counted on the indifference of adults, and occasionally, tacit encouragement. On most occasions when I asked for help from an adult, the response was, "Shut up, you little faggot." (Incidentally, I don't believe I'd worked out my sexual orientation when I was eight.) I seriously doubt the bullies would have been so confident had adults intervened with any consistency. Of course, it's classic for bullies to threaten retaliation if the victim complains and a parent is informed, but that actually was relatively effective, at least in the case of parents who disapproved of bullying.

I totally agree.

My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.

We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.

Not mine. One good punch to the bully, and they'll call out to their pack, and they'll all beat you until you're bleeding and can't cry out anymore.

It's far more effective if an adult simply walks over and tells the bully to knock it off.

I keep thinking that one of the conceptual errors people frequently make is to confuse what makes a species tougher, in the sense of natural selection, with what makes an individual stronger. If you see a tree growing from a crevice on a sheer cliff, you know that's a pretty tough species of tree. But that's not a strong tree. It would have been a much stronger tree if it had grown in ideal conditions.

We're not getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers anymore. We need people who are strong -- as in, creative, empathetic, mutually supportive -- far more than we need people who are tough.

We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.

From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.

The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.

I hate hearing that bullshit.

In elementary school, the routine was that the bullies would stand in a circle around their victim, and the leader would start hitting the victim. If the victim just curled up in a fetal position and hid his face, then only one bully would hit him. If the victim tried to resist -- say, by pushing the bully away -- then the entire pack would close in, and together beat up the victim, to "teach him a lesson". The yard duty teachers would ignore this, usually, despite the fact it usually happened in the middle of the playground, in plain sight. A few times I was called in to talk to teachers or administrators, who asked me what I was doing to provoke bullies and how I thought I could change my behavior to stop provoking them. My mother insisted I was effeminate and disgusting and deserved to be bullied; my father was more sympathetic.

That was my experience at two elementary schools in wealthy suburbs. Later, we moved to a poor rural area, where there was considerably less bullying. At that school, teachers tended to respond promptly and intervene in bullying and fights to break them up. Zero tolerance for violence? Please, more of that.

I've long wondered if the behavior of kids in wealthy suburbs was the result of their being trained to be sociopaths, to suit their future social roles as managers and professionals.

People can't be blamed for failing to read the full text of the proposition. For one thing, a recurring tactic in the California ballot initiative system is for opponents of one proposition to push their own proposition, with wording that is difficult for a lay person to distinguish from the other proposition, but with some clause that causes it to override the other proposition and nullify its intended effects. What typically happens is that voters will see two propositions that seem to have the same laudable purpose, and will vote for both of them; the deceptive proposition passes as well as the genuine proposition, and nullifies the genuine proposition.

I remember on one occasion in the 1990s, when there was a suite of propositions sponsored by environmental groups, and an opposing suite of propositions sponsored by industry groups. I felt that, as a good activist, I really ought to read through the propositions themselves. For one thing, I'm not a lawyer, and it's a rare person who enjoys spending an entire day reading through dense legalese. More importantly, however, even having done that, I still couldn't tell which proposition was which, except by checking what political groups supported which proposition.

In this case, it was more a matter of pushing a proposition that sounded good from the ballot summary. If someone had a proposition for providing free milk to orphans, it would pass, without most people noticing that on page 35 of the text of the proposition, it called for the purchase of milk contaminated with depleted uranium.

Most people headed to the polls, I expect, with a firm decision about which candidate for president they would support, but little idea of any other issues that would see on the ballot. This is a problem with how our elections work: I doubt any media outlet spent five seconds discussing who was running for the community college board, but that sort of local issue is one in which an individual vote is much more meaningful than a vote for president.