ScienceNostalgia101

I mentioned it as an example of a job for which rural settings, as opposed to urban ones, are a competitive advantage. Putting aside urban pollution and whether or not customers fear that might affect crop quality, there's also the aspect that high land values in major cities would make it pricier to buy large amounts of land to use for farming, hence the financial incentive to do it outside the major cities. (Regardless of whether or not "farmers" fit the archetypical 1950s stereotype; and by the way, I'm thinking more of farm employees than farm owners. My image of farmers comes from Food Inc., not Charlotte's Web.) I used the fishing village analogy because one job leads to money in the economy, which can spill over into nearby towns. As for a town surrounded by fishing villages; picture the fishing villages along the coast as being like points along a concave mirror, and the town surrounded by them as being like its focal point. I'm not trying to pre-emptively dismiss the possibility of other walks of life for which urbanization is the more competitive advantage, of course, just that it's doubtful there's one quite as necessary to quite as many people as farming. And as for the fossil fuels farms use... from what I recall, wouldn't oil rigs also be easier to get approved outside of urban centres than within them, if only because fewer people would want that in their backyard?

As in, how much extra money the business makes from revenue after all their expenses are accounted for. I figured that would be obvious.

I'm not referring solely to farming jobs, but also to jobs that relate to providing services to farmers. For instance, if a town's economy were associated with selling services to people from the surrounding fishing villages, the more fishing jobs there are, the more lucrative that small town's economy built on selling services to fishing villages would be. If the fishery were to collapse, that town's economy would be dealt a secondary blow. I get frustrated whenever rural types vote Republican, as it seems like mental gymnastics to say capitalism was wrong about this one (implied in the acceptance of farming subsidies) and still expect it to be right about everything else. I don't think it's any coincidence they engaged in the same mental gymnastics around the MLB/Georgia controversy. However, that doesn't change the fact that farmers are providing a service the rest of us literally physically need.

The broad outline of my point applies almost as well to Sweden as it does to Denmark, just not quite as well. If Danes can make $20/hr providing fast food services, and Danes can make $15/hr, then it borders on slander to assume that the Americans paid less than that are being "paid what they're worth." Their employers can clearly pay more than that and still make a profit if forced to, just not as exorbitant a profit.

I suppose it depends on how efficiently an assembly line could arrange the wires. Wire mesh is typically manufactured on a smaller scale, so I don't know where to start on how to determine how efficiently they could be done on a large scale while still being made rigid enough to withstand repeatedly being lifted on insulated support beams. Google search says 50 feet of 18-gauge aluminum wire would cost about 5 dollars; so depending on how narrow the spacing would be, materials cost alone could be overwhelming. Assuming a yard apart would be necessary... it would be, if, let's say, placed from the shores of South America to the Carribbean, it would be 3 million ft by 9 million ft... 18 trillion ft^2 of aluminum wire, or 2 trillion yd^2. If each yd^2 was bounded on two sides by 1 yard each of aluminum wire, this would take 4 trillion yd, or 12 trillion ft. $1.2 trillion... yowch. ...would it successfully attract lightning if they were placed a mile apart instead? Because if so we're looking at 1200 miles by 400 miles... or 4800 square miles. If each square mile is bounded on one side each by a mile of aluminum wire, that would be 9600 miles of aluminum wire... or about 50 million ft. $5 million is still a lot, the only question is whether or not it would eventually pay for itself. Quite frankly, I'm not sure how expensive maintenance would be on that either, let alone construction. Would the aforementioned thunderstorms induce electrochemical reactions and/or other sources of potential corrrosion?

Bumping because I have since thought of an elaboration on the lightning idea. (Wow, it's been more than a year already?) Suppose you had built a gigantic wire mesh above the Intertropical Convergence Zone, so as to capture much (if not most) of the lightning occurring over it, with support beams made of some material that resists electricity, such that going through some electrolytic solution that captures the energy would be the path of least resistance... would a single flat layer of wire mesh at some particular altitude (eg. the tropopause, or immediately below it) be adequate, or would you need several layers, one to capture cloud-to-ground lightning, one to intercept cloud-to-cloud lightning such that clouds exchange charge with the ground instead of each other, etc...?

Increasing espionage, and/or enhancing the methods thereof, to the point where we can unmistakably prove for a fact that kind of pandemics the World Health Organization either failed to deduce or hesitated to confirm. I don't claim to know all the details on how it'd work. We had spies sent to Iraq to investigate WMDs, and some of them actually blew the whistle on the Bush administration overselling the likelihood that Hussein actually had them. If intelligence-gathering can be that precise even in the face of all those biases, surely with the right methods we can do better than the WHO.

...you know what I mean. Unionization discredits the "if we had to pay them that much money we'd just fire them" notion just as severely as a minimum wage would. Whether because of unionization or because of a minimum wage, employers are still forced to pay more than they would otherwise.

You're the one putting faith in an institution that has failed us time and time again. The current extent of intelligence-gathering has either been inadequate to communicate to the western world the pandemic that was occurring in Wuhan, or was itself stifled on telling us. We need to step up our game.

As opposed to continuing to put faith in an institution that made the exact absurdly similar mistakes (at best) over and over again? We don't need a World Health Organization, we need world health espionage. To hell with "national sovereignty," engage in some damn snooping. Record these facilities. Live stream it to the western world's spy agencies. We put soldiers at risk to defend the western world from the most vague of potential threats. I don't think putting spies at risk to defend the western world from pandemics that already have a history of killing people by the millions is a bridge too far.

For years, I assumed big-city rent was expensive because the bragging rights, and/or glamour, of urban areas were worth the money in the eyes of their residents. I don't know how sustainable such a situation is; I figure the menial jobs like janitor and grocery store clerk necessary to keep such a city going surely can't be compensated well enough to pay for their out of control rent; but I figure if they decide that it's worth it to go to such a major city, and those who have other priorities opt to live in small towns, so be it. If the rich take over the big cities, then that means that at least their money is going to some landlord instead of to buying a second yacht or whatever. (Though frankly, I'd rather it go into the government coffers to help the poor.) But now I see a massive pandemic that has for the most part spared small towns of the kind of situations where doctors have to decide whether to save you or save grandma. That this has sparked an "eviction crisis" and not an "oh shut up landlord you couldn't pay ME enough to live in this death trap anymore" crisis makes me think there has to be more to it than glamour and/or bragging rights... unless they're literally to die for. What's this all about, anyway? Is it really about how many jobs big cities have? If so, why hasn't the fact that small towns lend themselves (relatively) better to farming (plus said farms are subsidized by the government on top of that) incentivized de-urbanization instead of urbanization? If it's the fact that that can't transport people between small towns as efficiently as between big cities, why not have parking garages in small towns, next to train stations, such that people can just drive to the train station instead of driving to another town and probably hitting a deer along the way? I've been on both sides of this issue. I've been indirectly called a loser hick by people who use that label on people with opinions similar to myself on the above, and I've more directly been called a smug liberal who couldn't survive in the wilderness to save my life by people for merely pointing out that, for all their supposed worship of the "free market," the type of people who typically vote Republican have no problem accepting government money in the context of farm subsidies. They can't both be right. Theoretically, if there were no such thing as international travel, could you have major cities without having pandemics? I suppose it's mostly the city-dweller vote that puts pressure on politicians to keep international travel open, as both the former and the latter are associated with the left, but that still leaves behind the question of whether or not a more direct correlation could be established, and if so, why...

Can you blame them? The World Health Organization has a pattern of being wrong about new diseases coming out of China. Whether through gullibility or corruption, their credibility has been tarnished. The whole thing should have been abolished, everyone involved should have been fired, and we should've started the hell over with people who can either see through China's lies or are more willing to call them out.

Is that as widespread, historically, as 12 yr old girls marrying 12 yr old boys, though? I usually hear mostly about the latter. According to the same social sciences that gave us "surveys" to which respondents could lie. How did that work out for us in 2016? It's too late. The critics of "deterrence-centric" reasoning pointed out that the deterrence value of harsh sentencing was unfalsifiable, but then ruined it all by making themselves look like the biggest hypocrites in the world when they jumped to unfalsifiable conclusions about the motives of those pushing it. And then for some of those people those conclusions turned out to be wrong anyway. By rights, the prison industry owes them a lot of money. Without their help, their critics wouldn't look like such hypocrites, and the voters wouldn't hand so many prisoners over to them. But hey, it's possible either the "tough on teenage criminals" OR "lenient on adult criminals" approach will fail. So why not try both? Why not try to smooth out the gap on both ends, by being tougher on teenage criminals and more lenient on adult criminals? Hell, maybe some parents might start to give a damn about the root causes of crime if their adorable teenage daughter is looking at jail time. Either way, one thing's for sure; we have to stop letting whether to try them as adults or as kids be up to the judge. That's how you get racial disparities like the ones iNow points out. (Which are, of course, par for the course given every other aspect of sentencing.) Drag files here to attach, or choose files... Max total size: 3.91 MB Drag files here to attach, or choose files... Max total size: 3.91 MB Okay, I do not know what exactly is wrong with the above post and why it is superimposing the "drag files here to attach" thing over it. Any mods have any input on that? EDIT: Oh, I missed the earlier part. Regardless of attempts to blame solely the "prison-industrial complex" fall flat, because they wouldn't be able to do what they do if not for judges, city councilors, state representatives, federal representatives, etc... alike getting elected on promises to be "tough on crime."

So recently I've been hearing about various teenage criminals being tried as adults because of the seriousness of their crimes. But if the point of leniency for teenage criminals was to dismiss them as not knowing any better... doesn't that notion apply regardless of the seriousness of their crimes? If whether or not they know better depends on the individual... why have leniency for teenage criminals at all? Why not just draw from the same interval of sentencing options we have for adults, and if they're not wide enough for individuals of any age who didn't know better, widen the interval of sentencing options for adults too? For most of history, teenagers were treated as adults, and they responded by acting like adults. Ancient Egyptians were known for getting married in their teen years. Medieval European teenagers left home to become squires in their teen years. Meanwhile, modern teenagers are prohibited from getting jobs in their early teen years, and so, they can tell their teachers "I don't need school, man, plenty of places will hire me without a diploma" and have cover for why they don't try one of those jobs then and there. There can be no doubt. On a historical scale, we're the weird ones for infantilizing them. So why go easy on them in criminal sentencing at all? If you want a petty teenage criminal who didn't know better to have a second change at rehabilitation, why not offer it to an adult who stole because they were desperate? Right now we create a system that breeds desperation, and if some people resort to crime instead of settling for poverty, we throw them in jail to get beaten by the guards and raped by their cellmates and let out into a world where they don't qualify for welfare and no one wants to hire them, all with the blessing of a plurality of voters. But for some reason, this plurality of voters is more okay with this potentially happening to their sons and daughters in their adults years than in their teen years, even though, to our ancestors if not subconsciously to ourselves, teenagers are adults. Why is that?

Har har. You know what I meant. Look, there is a legitimate tradeoff between using words and phrases the way they were originally intended and communicating in ways that everyone else is used to. Sometimes, rightly or wrongly, by force of habit, we will err on the side of the latter. But the number of people using a word or phrase wrong does not constitute blanket immunity from criticism. If you look, for instance, at the word "communism," many right-wingers and even some independents will blame it for the woes of modern China. By rights, this should cast doubt on the credibility of the person doing so, as Xi Jinping's policies are blatantly at odds with communism as Karl Marx, who invented the word, described it. I've been called out on this myself when attempting to do the same (not because I had a problem with Marxist ideals so much as because I wanted to undermine the notion of blaming atheism for communism, even if at the expense of everything but my anti-theist beliefs; and yes, I regret that). Yet the left, while seeing through that misuse of the word "communism," seems to have no qualms dismissing people who regard freedom of speech as meaning more than just whatever the Founding Fathers meant as not knowing any better, even though it entered the English language long before the USA's founding.

So if any number of people want to arbitrarily decade that almond means coffee cup, or that kettle means faucet, then all who used the terms the way they were previously meant to be used get to have the rug swept from beneath their feet? That sounds less like a language and more like mob rule where reason doesn't need to be on your side if popular opinion is; that popular opinion gets to redefine a word that wasn't theirs to redefine. So the ancients had the concept of freedom of speech, but that still doesn't specify when it entered into the English language. Without that, we are left with nothing but any plurality of people getting to change whatever definitions they want to even if the word wasn't theirs to redefine.

I see this webcomic linked to a lot. Quite frankly, I see it linked to far more often than I see people actually claiming their First Amendment rights are being violated by a private company denying them a platform. The other side of it, of course, is that I do see a lot of people calling it a violation of "freedom of speech" in a more general sense; in the idea that protecting people from getting thrown under the bus over their beliefs by their own employers despite otherwise doing their jobs. The only question is whether the phrase "freedom of speech" has a legitimate application beyond the Constitution's use of the phrase. And the only legitimate metric of that is to ask who invented the phrase, and how did they define it. If they defined it more broadly, those using it more narrowly are the ones who are in the wrong. If they defined it more narrowly, those using it more broadly are the ones who are in the wrong. Is anyone here familiar with older versions of the phrase from within the English language?

How has the fact that Scandinavia pays $20/hr for fast food workers not eliminated all hesitation at raising the minimum wage at least to 15? Surely, if nothing else, it has discredited the notion that hiring these employees wouldn't be profitable at those wages...

The trouble with "geek" and "nerd" is that they're somewhat ambiguously defined. I considered myself a nerd because I was really into video games and edutainment; and sometimes edutainment video games; growing up. However, I was never bullied for that, even though I was bullied for other things. As well, as I discovered the hard way on gaming chatrooms, so-called "nerds" can be just as prone to the same kinds of vile, mean-spirited and sometimes bordering on libelous behaviours as anyone else, if not more so. People who were overweight and people who were underweight alike, people who were into games and hip hop and into games and anime alike, etc... were brought together by their common ground of smelling my blood in the water. Being babyfaced and medium weight does you no good online. I wonder if there might be a bias in TV and video games to portray nerds as innocent and/or underdogs because filmmakers themselves are "nerds" to whatever extent that term can be defined. So, all else held constant, they'd rather portray other nerds as underdogs than suppress their own biases. Competition is tight, sure, but not necessarily tight enough to weed out even the most sincere of biases about what sort of stories they think viewers will be the most willing to believe.

Circumstantial evidence, however open to interpretation, is meaningfully distinct from "no evidence at all."

For the record, I'm fully aware that ideally vectors should be scaled and these vectors are obviously not. This was just meant to illustrate the point from an angle perspective, not a scaled magnitude one in and of itself.

I'm not claiming to know it for a fact, but I think there is a reasonable suspicion. On lesser issues (eg. video game reviews) companies have been known to fire reviewers who are too blunt in criticizing video games made by their sponsors. The comments that get featured on TV shows that read them on-air seemed to be debating only the merits of subsidies and/or protectionism in a general sense, rather than the dairy angle that got ignored from many comments, including my own.

I mean, comparing, let's say, TV news, with its milk commercials, not giving this notion as much attention as it's been given online. On TV they always talk about milk subsidies, or complain about having to compete with foreign dairy, etc... it's always online comments that say we shouldn't be funding dairy in the first place, on the above (and other) grounds, and it's always those comments that don't get read on air. The example that comes to mind is CBC's Power&Politics, but I would extrapolate that to other shows and/or other channels. Keeping it real, it's primarily circumstantial. The CCP has a pattern of lying to the rest of the world about pandemics they are responsible for (COVID-19, SARS, etc.) and the WHO has a pattern of making statements that, while not completely in line with CCP propaganda, still turn out to be at best a middle ground between reality and CCP propaganda, as if unduly influenced by the latter. I am merely extrapolating the pattern. Hence posting it here and not "medical sciences." Likewise with type 1 diabetes, the virus theory seems rather nonchalantly dismissive about vast difference in incidence rates.

For years I'd been unsatisfied with the mainstream medical explanations of type 1 diabetes. Viruses cause it? Okay, which viruses, and why do they give people in some places type 1 diabetes at higher rates than others? I'd come across some theories that the ingestion of cow's milk and messing up the human immune system, and concern that both the dairy industry AND pharmaceutical industry have a mutual (between them, not for the rest of us) interest in keeping it covered up; the former to keep their cows, the latter to keep their cash cows. It's not accepted by the mainstream media, but I've been going for almond/soy/coconut based alternatives to dairy ever since. So it was a little cathartic to see the hashtag #Wuhan trending lately, and people not letting up on holding the CCP; whose previous lies about this disease have been exposed; to the utmost of skepticism. A recurring theme with this hashtag is the notion that COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab and that the WHO; an institution partly funded by China; has a vested interest in not going too severely against its government propaganda to say so. We saw signs of this in the dodging of questions about Taiwan. We shouldn't put anything past them. Even Bill Maher has mentioned the idea on his show RealTime, despite being left-of-center, and this notion being associated with the right. How do we investigate the origins/causes of diseases in ways less likely to be held back by conflicts of interest?

Sorry, force of habit. I'm so used to almost all the pipes in that game being green I forgot to check the colour before posting. I'm referring to the blackish-greyish pipe at the bottom-left corner of the screen, underneath compartment A. In any case, thanks!