And yet at least two of the places where this has happened were able to rebuild, and quite magnificently, I might add.

I think it gives you a very good sense of how and why facebook will default to decisions not in your interest

how is it that common standards make so much sense for html, programming languages, engineering but not for human communication?

HTML and other standards do change but usually to add clarity or features.

I can see the value of changes to language which increase clarity or make it more concise (for example sharing a common vocabulary of "patterns" can increase your teams design and programming effectiveness. )

But arbitrary slang which the other person is unlikely to understand or which doesn't have a clear and common meaning- not so much.

They've repeated lied in the past and will continue to lie in the future.

Understand if you post on Facebook, you have no privacy.
Even if other people post about you on facebook, your privacy is going to be impaired.

Understand *you are the product being sold*.

It's a challenge for me. I finally withdrew from facebook. It's taken a while for people to start emailing me. At first they were annoyed that I needed special handling and they couldn't just set the event up on facebook. But now there are more of us avoiding facebook so email is coming back.

I wouldn't have withdrawn if they hadn't been such weasels about privacy settings.

I think your graphite point is valid.

However, we don't know what we don't know.

Say there was an earthquake; the pool was breached; and all the water was lost for 24 hours.

How bad could that get?

Most likely just a raised cancer risk for all but maybe 500 square miles.

But it's getting worse and we don't know what's still undiscovered or unreported.

From WSJ:

        [...] Tepco said it doesnâ(TM)t think that water has flowed into the sea but canâ(TM)t say for sure. Some of the flooded reactor basements are similarly too hot to approach, and it is still not clear where the melted fuel cores are, or in what state.

        âoeIn the future there might be even more heavily contaminated water coming through,â said Atsunao Marui, head of the groundwater research group at Japanâ(TM)s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and a member of a blue-ribbon panel set up in May to figure out ways of managing the radioactive water. âoeItâ(TM)s important to think of the worst-case scenario.â

        Mr. Marui and others say the biggest reason for the scramble now is that Tepcoâ"and the government bodies that oversee itâ"werenâ(TM)t planning far enough ahead and waited too long to respond to problems they should have seen coming long ago.

        Fukushima Daiichi was built some 40 years ago on the site of a river that was diverted in order to situate the plant, Mr. Marui says. It should have been clear that lots of groundwater would be rushing through the site, he says, and that any walls or barriers built on the seaward side would soon be overwhelmedâ"something that, indeed, has happened in recent weeks. [...]

It happens in the US as well. In thirty days, the state I live in is going to make talking on a cell phone without hands free an excuse for a stop (currently, it can be cited, but only incidental to a stop for another reason, such as, driving erratically.) Yet it's not unusual for me to see a police officer operating a cell phone (held to ear, not with a bt earpiece) and a laptop computer while driving. I've seen some use two cell phones at the same time. And follow speed limits, laws regarding signalling, etc, etc? Forget about it.

Such a pessimist.

https://www.google.com/#q=ball+gag&safe=off

He's probably a tralfamadorian, unfamiliar with human customs and just wanted to verify his studies of our species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chernobyl_radiation_map_1996.svg

The Chernobyl exclusion area is about 700km from tip to tip. Varying from about 300km wide to 100km wide.

Total "lost" area is 2,600 km.

If a similar area were lost in Japan it would be .6% of their total land mass, concentrated in important areas (potentially including tokyo as noted above).

I agree, it's unlikely. But it's not impossible.

I get that, but if your speedometer is pegged to the maximum reading at 150mph, the thought might occur to you that you are going faster.

We have a few problems with just crunching the numbers in this case.

First of all - Not everyone who manages to 2.0 their way through a STEM degree will do well at it, or even like doing it for that matter.

Second - A STEM degree (even with a 2.0) carries the prestige of "this guy knows something". For all the require-a-degree-but-not-really jobs out there, having a "real" major rather than Wymins' Studies will go a loooong way toward getting you in the top half of the pile of applicants.

Finally, jobs that really do require a STEM background tend to favor younger people, both in terms of sharpness of mind and lack of experience to say "no" to regularly putting in 60+ hours a week, on salary. The core STEM workforce of the 90s and even the 00's has largely moved on to manage today's engineers - If they haven't gotten so sick of busting their ass that they dropped out and went on to a sleepy AP Entry Clerk position somewhere.

So yes, we very much do have both a surplus and a shortage. We have a surplus because not all STEM grads can or want to work in STEM; we have a shortage because we don't have enough people good enough or naive enough to put up with actually doing a STEM job.

Just keep in mind that outside of smoking them, the nicotine and THC/Cannibinoids are relatively modest in their effects.

You can deliver nicotine or THC/Cannibinoids as food, drink, heck- even chicken with dumplings or chocolates.

Just as with all drugs, some percentage will abuse them. It may be because of their genetic background (like native americans with alcohol), their upbringing, self medication for depression. But a large majority can use them without abuse.

I'm a bit fuzzy on this but I looked it up once and the percentage difference between tobacco and nicotine was 11% and 13%. I think cocaine was about 15% or 17% (but not sure).

I watched british documentary where they gave the reporter straight cannibinoids and she just had tons of fun, couldn't stop laughing, and had no ill effects.

If you recurse that one step back, you get to the people subverting mother nature and manipulating the genetics of peanuts to make them better for sale and harvest.

Why do we care?

Because today it's them, but tomorrow it might be us.
So we all help each other out. Altruism from self interest.

Note the difference: the latter is a belief system, the former isn't.

Only because you phrased it as such. In actuality, the atheist disbelieves in a deity given a lack of proof one way or the other - That still very much counts as a "belief", regardless of how positively or negatively you chose to word it.

Now, I have to agree with you that saying we can't know anything about the divine amounts to an assertion of faith. Merely saying we don't know and moving on from a moot question, however, does not.

I think, though, that we really have more subtlety here than two distinct groups. You already brought up "weak" atheism, we have the same for agnosticism (and theism, and gnosticism). Referencing that chart, any stance (in the absence of evidence, which describes our current reality) outside the center amounts to an irrational belief system. Personally, however, I consider it more of an error to posit that we can have information about something which may not even exist, than to say we cannot (as distinct from "do" and "do not"); but I will grant that as a slight deviation from pure rationality on my part.