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Comment Re:Were Hunter-gatherers doing better (Score 2) 92

A healthy hunter-gatherer lifestyle seems preferable to dying from lack of clean water.

What makes you think hunter/gatherers historically had access to clean water? What makes you think that water that the rest of the animal kingdom has been crapping and pissing in is "clean water"?

Comment Re:Were Hunter-gatherers doing better (Score 1) 92

I said hunter-gatherer, not living all by myself. They had things called tribes and families, you know. See Dances with Wolves sometime.

Feel free to take family and friends with you on your great experiment in living the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. If you can convince them that living in the woods scrounging for food is better than sitting in their comfortable house watching the interwebs....

Again, you seem to equate hunting/gathering with lawless anarchy where it's every man for himself. Ice Age hunters formed groups and undoubtedly worked well with each other.

Hmm, we've found physical evidence of murders among Ice Age hunters, so they "worked well with each other" no better than we do now. And "anarchy" is a lack of government. Which pretty much defines the Ice Age hunters. Or did you consider your Grandfather to be "government" when you were growing up?

By the by, I am by no means trying to suggest that "hunter/gatherer" is synonymous with solitude or anarchy. I AM trying to suggest that the lifestyle looks a lot better from the easy chair at home than it does when you're actually living it. And that romanticizing the hunter/gatherer lifestyle from your computer desk is, at best, silly.

Comment Re:Why giving ? (Score 1) 92

I am from China, and when I was in China, China was hit by the double whammy from Chairman Mao - in the form of great famine and cultural upheaval

Hey, you people decided you'd rather have Chairman Mao than the kleptocrats you had before. On balance, I'm not sure you made the right choice, but on the other hand, I'm not sure you didn't (the previous "government" was about as bad as any in history, when you come right down to it).

Tens of millions of people perished

From what I've read, closer to 100 million than to ten million. Mao easily displaced Hitler as the cause of the greatest number of human deaths in history (thought the Black Death still beats them both).

Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries? I mean, what the West is thinking?

Depending on whether you're talking government aid or private aid, the logic is that you get a better trading partner if those people over there aren't starving OR that it's the Christian thing to do (and don't waste my time going on about "christian hypocrisy" - the only people I actually know who go over to places like Liberia to help out (medical missions, in this case, every year, not just because ebola) are doing so because they consider it their Christian Duty).

They think without the "foreign aid" those poor countries will die?

Based on past evidence, a lot of them will. Note ebola, consider its effects sans Western medical people/equipment being sent to Africa.

For thousands of years the people of those "poor countries" were there before the "West" is known as the "West ... and they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?

For values of "survive" that include average lifespans of 40 years or so, starvation a year or two every decade, a great deal of what civilized people consider to be serious crimes (rape, murder, that sort of thing), etc.

Comment Re:Were Hunter-gatherers doing better (Score 3, Interesting) 92

than today?

No.

I kinda like the hunter-gatherer lifestyle myself. Agriculture is overrated.

Says a guy typing on a computer that couldn't exist along with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

For the record, agriculture was the first development that freed up labor from the "hunter/gatherer" mode to allow enough surplus to develop things like, oh, computers (along with the rest of civilization).

And no I'm not being racist, a noteworthy scholar had commented once that a hunter-gatherer from 100,000 BC lived better than the average man in 19th century London.

And another one decribed that lifetyle as "nasty, brutish, and short".

Just curious, have you ever tried a "hunter/gatherer" lifestyle? Gone to a wilderness area, ditched the trappings of civilization (clothes, cellphone, computer, canteen, all that stuff), and tried living on what you could hunt down or gather (and no, I'm not referring to what you can gather at the local Mcdonald's...)...

Comment Re:Police legal authority (Score 1) 165

a police officer should have the same rights as any ordinary citizen, except when they see a crime being committed.

Your sentence should have ended right after the word "citizen" if you really were talking about "rights".

Note that if you're talking about "powers" (something governments have instead of "rights"), I'm curious what "powers" you think a police officer should have when they see a crime being committed that you don't think an ordinary citizen should have.

Comment Re:The United States is turning into Untied States (Score 1) 110

The Great Depression was already a generation gone by the time World War II rolled around.

Interesting theory you have there, Butch...

Black Friday (widely acknowledged as marking the start of the Great Depression) was in 1929.

WW2 started in 1939.

I've never heard of a human society with ten year generations. we generally CAN'T have children much less than 14 years after birth, and generally don't for 20+ years. Hence the notion that a "generation" is 20-25 years....

And even that ten years assumes the Great Depression was over in a few months. As opposed to dragging on and on, as it actually did.

It should also be note that WW2 is generally credited by people with a clue with ending the Great Depression (though some argue that it didn't end it so much as hide it with a high fever - war production got people working, while the war lasted. And post-war production (it's no coincidence that America's most prosperous period was followed after much of the industry of the rest of the world was bombed into rubble) hid the continuing issues with the need to make things for most of the civilized world....

Comment Re:We've been doing it for a long time (Score 1) 367

If the globe isn't warming, that must mean the oceans aren't warming because they're part of the globe. Is that the case, Jane?

If the house is getting warmer, that must mean that the refrigerator is getting warmer, since the 'frig is part of they house, right?

That's an example of an elementary fallacy that we call the "Does Not Follow" (that's a (semi-)literary reference - anyone remember from what?).

Do note that PART of the Earth warming in no way implies that ALL of the Earth is warming.

Likewise, PART of the Earth NOT warming in no way implies that ALL of the Earth is NOT warming.

Comment Re:Sounds reasonable (Score 1) 243

but there are indeed a couple of very fishy things about this case, all pointing to an organised effort to get Assange extradited or otherwise transported to the US.

Oh, nonsense!

If the USA had really wanted Assange, the easy way to have gotten him would have been to extradite him from the UK while he was living there freely.

The whole notion that while he was living in the UK, the USA worked to convince Sweden to extradite him to Sweden so we could then extradite him to the USA is ridiculous.

It's not like Sweden is MORE friendly to the USA than the UK is....

Comment Re: It's still reacting carbon and oxygen... (Score 1) 143

- the nuclear plants require a lot of sweet water for cooling, 24/7, and the world is running out

Ignoring the rest of your points...

No, they don't.

1) It's quite possible to build a nuclear power plant that has a closed-loop coolant system. The navies of the world have been doing it for better than half a century.

2) You don't want pure H2O in the coolant loop in a reactor. Hot water is quite corrosive, so you add chemicals to lessen the corrosive effects of the water. The navies of the world have been doing this for better than half a century too.

3) Depending on design, you can use a secondary cooling system (that cools the water in the primary cooling system) that uses cooling towers, or that just uses sea-water. The navies of the world have been doing the latter for the last half century also.

Note that there are arguments against using sea-water, but the alternative (using fresh water) is, as you say, biting into a rather more limited resource.

P.S. Oh, by the way, it's quite possible to design a reactor that can respond to transient power demands. Navies of the world have been doing that for half a century or so also....

Comment Re:This is a good reminder for all technocrats (Score 1) 222

Commerce as it exists today means the invisible hand has been bought off by lobbyists, and it's now more interested in protecting the interests of major players.

To me, the invisible hand and the perfect, magical outcomes attributed to it is the biggest lie of economics.

So, what you're offended by is government interference in the economy?

Because "bought off by lobbyists" is exactly that - government interference in the economy.

It's interesting, by the by, that you seem to have the exact same idea regarding lobbyists and such that Ayn Rand had. Or didn't you notice that her villains weren't the government, but the industrialists who were bribing the government to intervene in the economy in their favour?

Comment Re:I bet Amazon would love to hire more women. (Score 1) 496

worthless antidote

Antidote for what? Some kind of poison, presumably, but I can't figure out what from context....

Or did you, in your semiliterate way, mean "anecdote"?

Here's my anecdote, by the by: My wife and I are both programmers, and she makes pretty much the same money I do (more right now - I was out of the workforce for a while dealing with cancer).

Comment Re:RTG (Score 1) 523

An additional 5 pounds in mass at launch would have required many times that much in additional fuel.

Since we're talking about taking out the five pounds (actually more like 20 pounds) of solar panels + batteries and inserting five pounds of RTG (actually probably closer to ten pounds), we're not actually talking about a massive increase in additional fuel.

On the other hand, let's assume we ARE talking about an extra five pounds of lander.

So, we make the guesstimate that it requires about 10% above escape speed from Earth to reach the design orbit (given the use of gravity assists, it probably doesn't, but hey, rounding errors). And given an Isp of about 300 (last I looked, Ariane was higher Isp than that, but, again, rounding errors...).

Hmm, that works out to 320 extra pounds of fuel for the launch!!! Out of the 270 metric ton launch vehicle. A 0.05% increase in launch mass...oh, the humanity!

Seriously, if the worst case analysis for the RTG is a 0.05% increase in launch mass, I fail to see the insurmountable problem....

Comment Re:The Great Big Rock (Score 1) 523

The mass of the Churyumov---Gerasimenko comet is roughly 1 x 10^13kg. Should it ever fall to earth, I wouldn't expect the dispersal of U-238 from an aging Rosetta-class probe to be my biggest concern.

Hmm, 10^13kg at hitting the planet at escape speed (actually, a bit more, but escape speed will suffice for demonstration purposes). That works out to about 6.2x10^20 joules.

Call it 150000 megatons equivalent, in round terms (it's actually a few thousand megatons short of that, but rounding errors).

Hmm...150000 megatons + 5kg of Pu238... 150000 megatons without the Pu238...

Yeppers, got to come down on the side of "the Pu238 wouldn't matter if the comet hit the planet.

Caveat: given that you lived in the sweet spot where total destruction caused by the 150000 MT explosion didn't get you, it would be annoying to be clonged on the head by an RTG containment vessel, so in that one case, the Pu238 (as an addition to the 150000 MT) might matter.

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