Well, by 2050 we'll have 9 billion people, but by that time all our fish stocks worldwide will have collapsed completely from overfishing. We don't farm and cultivate the sea, we just hunt and poach the fish from it. We're still getting better and better at fishing, using sonar, bigger nets, better ships, but just as the technology makes it easier to find fish, it is getting harder and harder to find them, fishermen are having to travel further and further to get their catches, ultimately this cycle is destined to total failure. So that's one source of food production that we will ultimately have to do without. Unless something changes...

In case you haven't noticed, there is no shortage of platforms or venues for a man such as that to express his views.

One of his angles was to say that Obama was on a "jihad."

I knew right away that he was a conservative because he didn't know the meaning of the word.

Couldn't you tell? I mean, why would anyone cultivate stupidity such as that?



>> ^lullaby_lune:
Rougy: Thanks for turning this into yet another "Republicans are the devil" sift. The words "republican" and "democrat" were never even stated in this video. I saw this as a question of racism and bigotry... regardless of political affiliation.
I very much appreciate the interviewer here. He actually let the man talk while still completely exposing his ignorance.

>> ^dag:
I do think they cultivate such an environment, perhaps not intentionally in all cases - but the relationship between patients and doctors, in my experience is mostly about domination and control. I'm not against medical science, I am for breaking down the walls between the medical world and consumers.

That is starting to change. The old generation of doctors, especially surgeons do have a paternalistic relationship with their patients. However, for quite a while now, medical education has shifted heavily to a patient centered, team based approach.

And as E_Nygma pointed out, it is great that your births went well. But having worked in Obstetrics and seen some of the fucking complication nightmares that can occur, it is ridiculous for me to even consider a birth without some form of OR and surgical team ready on hand. And there is such a huge shortage of OBs that it's hard to find one who is not overworked and overstressed. They do it out of a sense of duty to their communities and their profession. They sacrifice their personal lives so that in case the shit hits the fan, there's someone there to save you. And it's not that some OB's prefer C-Sections just for their patients for profit. Studies show that a significant portion of OBs prefer, and select C-sections for themselves. It's not some industry trying to screw you out of your money.

And painting epidurals as something unnecessary, and used instead to line the OB's pockets, is so ignorant. You might as well say the same thing of antibiotics, vaccines, and anesthetics in general.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I do think they cultivate such an environment, perhaps not intentionally in all cases - but the relationship between patients and doctors, in my experience is mostly about domination and control. I'm not against medical science, I am for breaking down the walls between the medical world and consumers.

>> ^E_Nygma:
while i'd agree with you that women in labor are sometimes intimidated by hospital settings and made uncomfortable within them, to say that the medical industry and its practitioners intentionally cultivate such an environment is a slap in the face of a multitude of people who have dedicated a majority of their lives to helping others. it's also plain wrong. i've never seen an epidural given to a woman who didn't want one, but i've seen plenty of women begging for pain relief who initially wanted none. while i'm glad your personal experience of home birth went well, like tymbrwulf points out, there are many for whom unique circumstances result in an emergency trip to a hospital and a birth that is far from optimal.
>> ^dag:
The patrician medical industry is vested in keeping childbirth a scary, painful experience. Epidurals and C-sections are their favorite tools.

while i'd agree with you that women in labor are sometimes intimidated by hospital settings and made uncomfortable within them, to say that the medical industry and its practitioners intentionally cultivate such an environment is a slap in the face of a multitude of people who have dedicated a majority of their lives to helping others. it's also plain wrong. i've never seen an epidural given to a woman who didn't want one, but i've seen plenty of women begging for pain relief who initially wanted none. while i'm glad your personal experience of home birth went well, like tymbrwulf points out, there are many for whom unique circumstances result in an emergency trip to a hospital and a birth that is far from optimal.

>> ^dag:
The patrician medical industry is vested in keeping childbirth a scary, painful experience. Epidurals and C-sections are their favorite tools.

>> ^d3bas3r:
This is a slippery slope, next they will make it legal to grow hemp to make fabric and paper.


Or rope, or oil, or clothing, or... oh yeah, that's how we did things for hundreds of years until cotton cultivation became the 'in thing'!

Actually, this is the very idea that the ancient Greeks had. It's pretty well known that Sparta deliberately cultivated homosexual relationships between soldiers. It's somewhat less well known that Thebes did something similar. They formed an elite team made up exclusively of gay couples that led them to a 40 year string of military victories, defeating armies several times their size. This Sacred Band, as it was called, was only defeated by the superior tactics and weaponry of the Macedonians, who rolled over the Greek states like a tidal wave.

So it's not just comedy. It actually works in at least some situations.

>> ^dag:
Humans can get by just fine without animal proteins. And as the literature at my local Hari Krishna restaurant says- you could feed the entire world 7 times over if the crops devoted to livestock feed were instead used for human food production.


I already referenced the Least Harm Principle. "So, every time the tractor goes through the field to plow, disc, cultivate, apply fertilizer and/or pesticide, harvest, etc., animals are killed. And, intensive agriculture such as corn and soybeans (products central to a vegan diet) kills far more animals of the field than would extensive agriculture like forage production, particularly if the forage was harvested by ruminant animals instead of machines."

The conclusions of the LHP are that we should stop eating poultry and eat ruminant animals (cow, goat, sheep, deer, etc.). Reasonable estimates are that we would kill about 0.982 billion animals per year. Less than in the vegan alternative of 1.2 billion. (See: Davis, Steven L. "The Least Harm Principle May Require that Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet" in Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Vol. 16 No 4 July 2003.)

pprt - so in other words you have zero evidence to support your claims. other than the notion of strong intelligent women pursuing careers outside the home offends and threatens your dinosaur mind.

hows this for you, ancient hunter/gatherer cultures were structured in an egalitarian fashion. women and men while serving different roles were seen as equally important and shared more or less equal amounts of power. they worshipped both male and female dieties. it wasnt until the evolution into agrarian societies with womens role being focused more on the home and domestic duities and less on food cultivation that the power structure shifted, as well as shift to worshipping mostly male dieties. and this of course eventually evolved into modern monotheistic relgions and the notion of original sin and an obsession with feminine submissiveness and sexual chastity, bondage.

what is this idea that none of the women with iqs over 100 are feminists?
total fucking bullshit.

Refreshness on theoretical physics should be always welcome , however to be technically careful with new proposals is mandatory !
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Published: 6:02PM GMT 14 Nov 2007
Comments 596 | Comment on this article

The E8 pattern (click to enlarge), Garrett Lisi surfing (middle) and out of the water (right)
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.
• Garrett Lisi: This surfer is no Einstein...
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Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

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In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."
Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.
Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.
Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.
"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.
"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."
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The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.
He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.
The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.
But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."
And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."
Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan.
E8 encapsulates the symmetries of a geometric object that is 57-dimensional and is itself is 248-dimensional. Lisi says "I think our universe is this beautiful shape."
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What makes E8 so exciting is that Nature also seems to have embedded it at the heart of many bits of physics. One interpretation of why we have such a quirky list of fundamental particles is because they all result from different facets of the strange symmetries of E8.
Lisi's breakthrough came when he noticed that some of the equations describing E8's structure matched his own. "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'"
What Lisi had realised was that he could find a way to place the various elementary particles and forces on E8's 248 points. What remained was 20 gaps which he filled with notional particles, for example those that some physicists predict to be associated with gravity.
Physicists have long puzzled over why elementary particles appear to belong to families, but this arises naturally from the geometry of E8, he says. So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?" he says.
The crucial test of Lisi's work will come only when he has made testable predictions. Lisi is now calculating the masses that the 20 new particles should have, in the hope that they may be spotted when the Large Hadron Collider starts up.
"The theory is very young, and still in development," he told the Telegraph. "Right now, I'd assign a low (but not tiny) likelyhood to this prediction.
"For comparison, I think the chances are higher that LHC will see some of these particles than it is that the LHC will see superparticles, extra dimensions, or micro black holes as predicted by string theory. I hope to get more (and different) predictions, with more confidence, out of this E8 Theory over the next year, before the LHC comes online."

>> ^Sarzy
Since this post has essentially become a complete free-for-all, I'm going to respond to this here even though it's pretty much off-topic at this point. I agree that drama is essentially human nature, but not necessarily in the way that it has manifested itself here -- in most online communities, if one member has a problem with another, they will hash it out between themselves. If it's something really serious, such as a truly offensive racial slur or the like, then the offended party might go to a moderator. Here, on the other hand, if someone is even moderately offended by another member, the immediate inclination seems to be to go to sift talk and to share a private dispute with the entire community. That's the difference.


I think in most online communities you know your comments are being monitored by moderators or subject to being reported to a moderator, usually via a handy button button to do just that. That does modulate a lot of what people say. Here, there are zero moderators. So people in general speak freely, like adults, which I think was the point. It was supposed to cultivate a mature community that would moderate itself and people who were offensive would find themselves banned or shunned into leaving or shutting the fuck up. For the most part it's worked really well. But there are going to be times when people disagree and what you may think is moderately offensive might have someone else totally pissed off. There are no moderators to report to, and since we have no siftquisitions, it comes to sift talk. There were frivolous siftquisitions but there's plenty of times people hit a "report to moderator" button on other sites that weren't right either. I guess I'm just saying that the reason people do this shit here is because we're supposed to be this community that moderates itself and so that means the community gets to see (and resolve) all the shit that moderators have to put up with. I don't think there's any more drama here than anywhere else, ours is just in the open.

"It doesn't take long to look up some information on your own to find out who's trying to do the real spinning."

^ thanks, i did just what you said

took about 20 seconds...

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/08/19/organic.cooking.pv/index.html

"Researchers studied five different crops -- carrots, kale, mature peas, apples and potatoes -- which were cultivated both organically (without pesticides) and conventionally (with the use of pesticides) and found that there was no higher level of trace elements in the food grown organically."

enoch - the "cet" in Roxicet refers to acetaminophen, it's a combination drug of oxycodone and acetaminophen, generally in a 5/325 or 5/500 formulation. Although naming conventions are far from standard, "cet" usually indicates acetaminophen (as in Percocet, Darvocet, and Ultracet), while "dan" refers to aspirin (as in Percodan and Endodan). I've seen both parts of ibuprofen used in naming (Ibudone, Vicoprofen).

The pill bottle shown in the video (and the drug you're referring to) is Roxicodone, a brand name oxycodone without the non-narcotic partner, in a 5, 15 or 30mg dose.

With all that out of the way, this is a problem that's very personal to me as well - from a different perspective. I'm a dentist, so narcotic pain medications are an essential tool in treating my patients, but my responsibility to avoid feeding or cultivating a narcotic addiction is never far from my mind.
It's an expected part of the job, but it's always incredibly frustrating when you discover a patient has lied or withheld information from you to score narcotics. I've had pharmacies call me to tell me that the patient I'd just given an Rx for 24 Norco 5's had received an Rx for 120 Vicodin a week prior from a pain management clinic, or worse, that they'd recently filled an Rx for a month of Suboxone, a methadone alternative (and a neat one at that, if you're into that sort of thing). In other cases, I'll find out that a patient filled the prescription for pain medication, but not the antibiotic that will actually address the root cause of the problem and provide more definitive relief.
As a result, I tend to be somewhat reserved when prescribing narcotics, leaning heavily on OTC ibuprofen (alone or in combination with acetaminophen).
At the same time, I have an obligation to minimize my patient's pain, so it's a difficult balance when someone's undergone treatment that I know poses a significant likelihood of post-operative pain, or when a patient cannot receive treatment immediately for a likely painful condition. I don't want to be responsible for one of my patients developing an addiction to narcotic pain medications (or muscle relaxants) but at the same time I don't want my patients to suffer through pain that could possibly be relieved.

I appreciate that there's also a delicate balance between patient privacy and provider privilege, but I can't dismiss the benefits of some recent programs that track narcotic prescriptions at the state level, and some insurance providers will send letters to practitioners advising them of potential drug interactions or overdose\abuse risks based on Rx's filed.

One of the biggest problems with all this is that it doesn't just hurt those who are addicted. Because doctors might be hesitant to prescribe narcotics due to the risk of abuse, other people are going to suffer through pain that could have been relieved.

>> ^NetRunner said...

The problem with that analogy is whether Videosift is like your backyard or not. I guess it could be considered a kind of gated community with bylaws, as opposed to a completely public place where all human rights must be respected.

It depends on whether we want to cultivate the community by manually pruning it, or rather think we benefit more from leaving it a little feral and organic.

No, we did it to save the 6.5 million Kurds out of the kindness of our hearts.


I'd be as surprised as you if Cheney's ever done anything out of the kindness of his heart. I still like the idea of saving those millions of Kurds even if Cheney only did it so he could pad his pockets.


And we only had to kill a million Iraqi's and turn another three million into refugees to do it.

Your wording says more about your world view than about what happened. You say killed, but died is more accurate. That you are content to lay every death since the US invasion on America and totally ignore the role of decades of living under a brutal sectarian dictator says everything. Your wording suggests that Iraqi's were peacefully united in one cause before the invasion, rather than living under the thumb of a vicious dictator that spent his time encouraging and cultivating sectarian hatred to secure his iron fisted rule.


or we won't give them the $120 billion dollars we promised them to help rebuild their country

Yes, the proof of America's evil intent is conditions being placed on billions of dollars of aid that America is offering to just give the Iraqi people?


Oil companies the underdogs?

Your the one that said they controlled less than 40% of the world's oil, not me. If your statements contradict each other look in the mirror.


Keep clutching at straws you racist war monger.

Funny you'd call someone racist while you pretend like Iraq was better off under Saddam.