I don't have an ad blocker. I use Request Policy to block external requests (and whitelist and temporary whitelist if I want external content in a web page). This blocks most ads by default, without any extra work on my part.

There will be new techniques to serve ads. AdBlock and your technique works because ads come from a different website than the one serving the content. Simply blocking those website like adBlock or by not allowing external requests to be loaded blocks ads. However, advertisers can easily ask the content provider to serve the ad and content together by first contacting the ad website at the server end.

Performance will be an issue for the heavier ads and they could do something like akamai for both content and ads. Both the content provider and ad server use the same set of hosts.

Of course, a new generation of tools would have to be built to counter something like this. But, that's another story.

Just because you can face your accuser in this case doesn't make what he's doing any WORSE than other surveilance. But people feel it is because they associate it with a person. Any strong power that can make use of this advantage will have a very strong position of power due to the information imbalance.

The output of surveillance cameras are vastly different than regular cameras. They provide an unappealing high-above kind of view. They are as exciting as watching the satellite views of cities, informative but ugly. Security guards will have to be trained to comprehend the output of these videos rather than these videos producing a vision of peeping tom's fantasy. I don't see surveillance video monitoring security guard more appealing a job than a plain old security guard job.

In the future, everyone will have wearable cameras and record everything. In Russia, dashcams are required by law and I'm sure it will be the same in the US as well in the future. Cyclists and runners are advised to have some sort of helmet or chest cam in case of accidents. Flash memory storage is getting cheaper and as low power video encoding boards come to market, it will be a part of our cellphone computing environment we carry around. In the future, it won't be just one person recording but everyone doing it.

You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now. As the supply of easily accessible minerals goes down, the value will go up -- the countries that wait the longest before ramping production will benefit the most. As for consumer electronics, what are they going to do? Stop making iPhones? If anything, that could be a short term boon to our economy, as we would suddenly have a motive to build a bunch of new factories and hire a bunch of workers. The increased cost of electronics would bug people for a while, but eventually they'd get used to it, and maybe even stop throwing away perfectly good phones every couple years. Meanwhile, what happens to China's economy when they cut out their largest trade partner?

They can use it give an advantage to their local industry. China is behind technologically and everyone is actively trying to make sure the Chinese don't get their hands on it. If China can give a slight advantage to their home industry and hope that the future leaders in electronics industry might be born from this. Even a tiny advantage might have a multiplier effect and take China to par with the rest of the world technologically.

As for paranoia, the US should be paranoid about Cisco stuff be made in China. It certainly gives me the willies.

Don't worry, the generation after you won't share the same sentiment. Each successive generation have seen larger and larger portions of the world as their "empathy circle". People identifying themselves by country is just a few generations old; before that people identified themselves more by the city or province they were from and before that a clan they belonged to. The future generations will see the a Chinese as just another person living their lives and trying to generally make things better. They certainly won't get willies imagining them as enemies fervently trying to take something away from you.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Japan was the one copying, making knockouts and whatnot. But what happened is exactly what you described: they learned. And that is exactly what is happening to China right now.

Just because China and Japan share some similarities does not mean they will keep increasing their similarity. The world is at a different stage now than when Japan was starting out. Power was manufacturing then but now it's information and knowledge. It was about making stuff back then but now it's about creating stuff. The modern environment may not take China where Japan went.

On one side, when China is sufficiently ahead technologically, China may decide not to be the factory of the world and dedicate millions of people and billions of yuan to research into curing cancer, solving clean energy problems and so on and generally making the lives better instead chasing consumerism. The Chinese authorities have to make things better for the population every year for everyone to be quiet and maybe everyone will have quality of life above the west European countries eventually because of this.

Or they may the big Japan producing gizmos for the world, slowly producing mega-corporations.

Or they may crash and burn.

There is a lot of murmur that capitalism has served well in the manufacturing phase of our human history but might not be best suited for post-manufacturing economies. Sitting around waiting for someone somewhere to make some breakthrough and creating industries out of it might not be the best way forward. Maybe national and global push towards solving the world's problems might be the way instead of hoping the invisible hand fixes it. Maybe a system like China where large central decisions are made and pseudo-capitalism creates efficiencies in those central pushes is the best way forward, or maybe the old communist ugliness will rear it's ugly head and create massive inefficiencies. I guess we have to wait and see where the world is headed and in that frame where China will be.

.. Only difference between us and them is their supply of sweets ran out pretty quick, then they had to spend a huge amount of that energy to chase down some creature that didn't want to be ate.

Which animal is made of "sweets"? You imagining running down chocolate bunnies?

And, besides the body uses fat as fuel as well; esp for running where training the body for metabolizing fat efficiently is considered a vital step for running performance.

Cravings is body's method of telling us it needs a certain type of nutrient. We have sweet cravings and cravings of oily food, sour food etc etc.

Craving for sweet is natural but modern sweets are not natural. The amount of sugar present far exceeds that is found in natural food and is not mixed in with dietary fiber like in natural sweet foods. Eating these modern foods completely disrupts our natural system and thus, the source of the problems.

The daily reference intake for sugar states that added sugar should nto exceed 25% of calories. For a 2000 Cal intake that is 500 Cal. The 7-eleven shitty "super gulps" and whatever exceed this in a single serving.

If you run/bike an hour in the morning, then the equation completely changes. Some people train in endurance sports, some have jobs that requires a constant use of the body muscles. That equation only holds for desk job people who don't exercise.

Sometimes people buy it and split it among two.

If you ask me they should just go and make a law that a single serving cannot contain more than 50% of the reference intake. That way you can sell those stupid 5 pint "drinks". You just would not be allowed to have half a pound of sugar in them.

The government reference tables are already messed up because of the daily percentage requirement on the labels.

...exploit flaws in human psychology ...

What flaw in human psychology?

Has it been verified outside laboratory conditions?

People crave sugar because it kept their ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors alive. Those who sought and consumed high energy foods when they were available stored up energy to last them through the harsh times. This continues into modern times. Humans are genetically programmed to desire foods laden with fat and sugar above all else. All that has changed is the availability - where those ancestors would have had to search for unpicked fruit or brave the bees to steal honey, modern man just guzzles down coke whenever he wants to. He always wants to.

For fuck's sake! This is why some people hate evolution.

I can make this argument using evolutionary theory: hunter gatherers didn't eat sweet stuff, they were primarily meat eaters since fruits are seasonal and not available all year round. Sugar is an artificial modern creation and modern fruits are breeds with the most sugar. We crave sugar because eating modern sweet foods messes up our system that was never designed to eat sweet stuff.

Evolutionary theory can be used to explain anything. Please don't fall into that trap of justifying your position using the theory of evolution.

people with high cholesterol have more heart attacks; lipitor reduces cholesterol

There is a tacit assumption here that high cholesterol is the cause of heart disease. It has been suggested that heart disease is the cause of high cholesterol - the body is circulating more cholesterol in the blood to repair heart damage. In this scenario, reducing the cholesterol with liptor does not make sense.

It's the sort of empty-headed 'gotcha' phrase that's so popular and so often used without real thought behind it.

Some researchers believe that the belief that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease is borne out of a faulty correlation-causation study. Heat disease is the largest killer in the United States and it could be that the foundation of what we believe of this disease is false. You think that's empty headed?

National policies are based on studies which are based on statistics. The national obesity epidemic is believed to be caused by policies based on studies with bad foundations.

This is one of the most serious errors that can be made in scientific studies and there are still many many studies that still make this error.

If you hear something like coffee lowers the risk of cancer/Alzheimer/diabetes/heart disease etc. they are correlation studies where the researches are speculating on the causation but the media is reporting the causation as the result of the study.

In what sense, exactly does science grow more powerful? In my experience, sciences grows more expensive, less funded, more hyped, less understood, and overall less heeded.

The answer lies in the origins of the phrase "paradigm shift" by Kuhn.

The advancement of science does not work the way you say it does completely as investigated by Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". When a new field is introduced, it grows more expensive, complicated etc with time but real scientific advancements come from "breakthroughs" that create a new field. What Kuhn coined "paradigm shift" (but now has been kinda bastardized by business speak).

To put it another way: correlation is an *observed* behaviour, causation is a *tested* behaviour.

The problem with this is what "tested" means. There many infinite variables that have to be fixed and a finite set varied on each test (making the testing time infinite).

Most researchers assume something does not affect something and ignore it as a variable. There are many results that have false causation because an ignored variable was hiding there.

Liking fast food is essentially chemistry. Science (yay, science!) has basically figured out what tastes good on the human taste bud. Fast food supplies this. Sure, you gourmands out there will choke and puke at the thought of fast food, but that is purely social conditioning (the kind that intelligent people insist they're too smart to fall for). Take someone with no preconceptions, say a barbarian from a pre-modern society, and serve them two meals: one of a Big Mac and the other Thai-Burmese-Argentinian fusion or whatever is considered haute cuisine these days, and the barbie will pick the Big Mac every time.

Fast food, at least in the USA, is just not about hacking the human taste but doing so at the cheapest possible price point. Cooking oil is used longer than it should be and sourced from lower qualities. There is an indelible taste of cheap ingredients and methods in fast food.

As long as the cuisine is not restricted to be being low in fat or low in sugar, it will easily blow away fast food. Just using genuine butter and quality cheese to a burger will make it better. Easy to make better fries and drinks by using sugar for sweetening and for fries good quality oils, animal fat or butter for frying. Use crispier vegetables, use flavorings better than ketchup etc. Then, there is numerous ways to make the meat taste better and add flavorings to the bun.

I think fast food is addictive because of the convenience and low cost. In the taste department, it's allright but you could make fast food yourself in minutes that's about the same quality if you set up your kitchen. A place to quickly grill meat and those small frying machines will get your fast food fix at similar quality in 5-10 minutes. If you're generous with the cheese, dressing and fats, it will even taste better.

I don't really share your adulation for fast food.

You will be no more valuable, economically, than a dishwasher, a fry cook or a gardener. What will you do then? Sorry, I had to ask.

You also say that breakthroughs in computer visions combined with robotics will make the job of a dishwasher, fry cook and gardener obsolete.

The key point is that those breakthroughs that would make that happen hasn't occurred yet. Breakthroughs don't happen on a time table so soon might turn to be a long long time.