babblefrog

If only we knew exactly what in the culture we need to fix. There are a lot of theories. Something in our environment has broken the homeostasis which worked for the last million years.

Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.

My understanding is the if the spike mutates, the virus can no longer get into your cells.

How long are you going to keep wearing the mask after everybody else stops, though?

Exercise increases heart rate. That’s why I stay away from it. I still drink coffee though.

I'm not sure there is a mainstream American right. There are several threads that appear to have incompatible ideas. Then the politicians try to give lip-service to all of them, which makes it impossible to actually deliver on any of their promises without pissing off the rest of their supporters.

I think there did used to be a main-stream of conservative thought, from Buckley through Reagan. But they are just one of the threads, now.

A couple of points:

1. Most or all of the mummies studied were from neolithic societies, not paleolithic. The only one that might be considered paleolithic is the Unangan, but even these are from decades after they were conquered by the Russians. So they may very well have had white flour and processed sugar in their diet. I couldn't find information about their diet during this period.

2. The time needed for natural selection to work. I'm not convinced by this one. The examples that were given would have had higher selection pressure on the young during their child-bearing years. I would guess that the selection pressure from diseases of old-age would be much less, and would take many more generations to be felt.

Still some good points to be made about the naturalistic fallacy.

I think there's a joke in there.

Not entirely market forces. City zoning often requires housing over there, shopping way the hell over that way, and your work miles away in a different direction. Which means that you have to drive to go anywhere. So everything is built to move cars around as quickly as possible, at the expense of making walking so unpleasant that nobody wants to go out there. There are a lot of intertwining forces here that have nothing to do with the market.

Well, for one thing, the school is an arm of government, not a private party. We allow private parties to do all sorts of things we don't allow governments to do.

I think some of that is generational. The women I work with who are my generation (I'm in my 50s) find that offensive, whereas the ones from the generation younger don't see anything wrong with it. I think the language is changing, where the previous generation would say men and girls, and my generation would say men and women, the next generation seems to be moving toward girls and boys.

Just a short note of clarification about the GPL: The intent is to protect the freedom of the users, not the developers. Essentially so that every user can potentially be a developer, too.

> humans are excellent at reading cues from body language, facial expressions, etc. to understand how other humans feel.

For most people, yes. For some of the geekiest among us, I'm not sure that always holds.

In the US, Everbank offers accounts in several currencies.

They appear to be carbo-loading. If I ate that lunch, I'd be asleep an hour later.

I think GWB really did think there were WMDs there. And protecting the oil supplies from who, exactly? They were going to go onto the market anyway.

This appears to be dependent on how you interpret the numbers. See http://uspirg.org/reports/usp/do-roads-pay-themselves for another view.

The non-driver issue is a big one. I believe I have read that typically on third of the population don't drive, either because they are too young, too old, or have some sort of disability. This doesn't include those who are poor enough that keeping a car is a major expense.

The ways we have used zoning (minimum lot sizes and setbacks, and putting housing over here and work and shopping way the hell over there), and engineering our roads to make automobiling as quick as possible, has disenfranchised a large part of our population.

You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.

> The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.

You seem to be trying to imply a cause and effect relationship here, without actually saying that. I'm sure we can find examples of rich countries with small governments, and poor countries with large governments.

Also, for rich countries with large governments, which came first? Did they become rich, then grow large governments, or did they get a large government, and then become rich? I would guess that the former is more typical than the latter.

I've always been confused by this. Does "as a US company" mean that it's HQ is in the US? Or that it is incorporated in the US? Or just that it does business in the US?

Commodities and currencies fluctuate against each other. Over longer terms, the value of currencies tends towards zero. Everything depends on the time frame you are looking at.

How the heck would you hold the trade deficit constant, and why would you even if you could?

Right next to the Amazon store ;-)

I suspect that supply and demand have a lot to do with it. Capital and innovation is scarcer than labor, especially unskilled or lower skilled labor.

To the contrary, Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981. The trend had already changed before that. There were major changes to our economy in the late 60s and 70s, including the "great society" programs of Johnson and Nixon, and the stagflation of the Nixon and Carter (and into the Reagan) years. I'd look into those things for a root cause, if I were looking. Which is not to say that Reagan's policies didn't possibly make things worse, too ;-)

Information is contained in transactions. That's how supply and demand determine prices in the real world.

One correction: Atkins died of head trauma after slipping on the ice, not heart failure. I guess you can call every death heart failure, though ;-)

Hmmm. More complex carbs are pretty much chains of glucose. The sugars you are talking about are glucose and fructose, about 50/50. If your explanation is the correct one, does that mean the problem is really fructose?

I'm not sure the difference is that big. Amylase in your saliva starts breaking down starches to glucose even before you swallow. Non-digestible carbs (fiber), protein and fat can slow down the process, however.