Nonsense. Pre industrial agriculture wasn’t very damaging in most cases…and when it was it was on a minuscule scale compared to industrial agriculture.
Pre industrial building wasn’t excessively environmentally damaging in most cases, certainly not to the point where it endangered the planet or it’s atmosphere.

It's utterly ridiculous hyperbole to say we have to be cavemen to not destroy our environment. We don't even have to revert to pre industrial methods, we just have to be responsible with our actions and lower the population massively. With minor exceptions, pre industrial farming caused little to no permanent damage, and it was almost all easily repairable damage. (With a few exceptions like Rapa Nui that may not have been over farming but cultural damage, we aren't exactly certain what happened there).

I eat berries now, don't you? I grow raspberries, blackberries, black raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, and Tay berries myself. People would be healthier if they ate berries, and they're tasty too. What?!

Yes, around 7 billion need to die (without procreating first). Better than all 9 billion.

There’s a huge difference between being occasionally deadly and so insanely toxic we destroy our own planet in under 200 years to the point where our own existence is seriously threatened.
Edit: toxicity levels matter as much as exposure levels. Cavemen impacted their environment at levels well below sustainability (mostly….the idea they killed the mammoths or mastodons off by hunting is, I believe, a myth….natural environmental changes seem much more likely to be the major influence in their extinction.). Per capita, modern humans have a much larger, more detrimental footprint than premodern humans, exponentially larger….and there’s like a hundred thousand times as many of us (or more) too. We need to reverse both those trends drastically if we are to survive long term.

Yes, progress includes risk, but risk can be managed, minimized, and not taken when it’s a risk of total destruction. We totally ignore risk if there’s profit involved.

This is a night time comedy show, not a science class. I think you expect WAY too much. It points out that there is a problem, it doesn’t have the time, or the audience to delve into the intricate chemical processes involved in the manufacture, use, and disposal of them. It touched on them, and more importantly pointed out how they’ve been flushed into the environment Willy nilly by almost everyone who manufacturers with them.

The EU has open borders and free travel amongst the various nations if you are a citizen of a member nation. I will agree our per capita death rate is higher, but still (based on the well researched Lancet study) you cannot lay more than about 40% of the deaths at Trump's feet. I don't deny he could have handled the pandemic much better, but it has been some time since we have had a pandemic on this level. Multiple leaders have handled it differently and time will eventually label them for the history aspect of it.

I go by the facts. Not conjecture, and not opinion. I also don't consider Birx to be even remotely a good source since she rode down the trail willy nilly with the same person you are blaming all the deaths on. I will never trust or vote for Trump again, but you cannot lay the percentage you are proposing on him solely. Just like we cannot move Biden to almighty status for his handling of the situation when he is currently running a similar death rate on par with the same time last year, WHILE having massive vaccination.

Has he made steps that have helped? Certainly and I would say he is definitely doing a better job than Trump, but by your own admission almost anyone could. The fact of the matter is, as I said last year, you cannot fight a pandemic like this without having the martial law like power China had or being in a situation to isolate yourself from outside contact.

I'm grateful he lost his shit like that, because it's clear he's the kind of officer that bends and breaks the law to get his way regularly, falsely charging people willy nilly, and had he not forgotten to turn off his car camera like he did his body camera he would still be abusing citizens and making up false charges as he goes.
I'm hopeful his family escapes his abusive draconian thumb too, I can only imagine how he treats them behind closed doors if this is how he acts towards others in public.

There's a reason they wait politely and dont jaywalk in Austria (and I'm guessing Germany as well). It's because cars have the right of way and its up to them to let you cross. If you walk out willy-nilly and are hit, it's on you.

As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

Please expand, because while I can see that he's picking and choosing some easy targets for criticism (over the top SJW stuff) that may not be representative of the at-large "Progressive" agenda, nothing really jumped out at me as a "straw man" argument.

I'm a somewhat conservative-leaning person (at least on issues that I think should be in the realm of government), but I feel like I have a legitimate beef with some of what the party that is "supposed" to cater to conservatives actually does in government; what the GOP seems to present as its "platform".

This guy is a liberal-leaning person who feels like he has a legitimate beef with some of what his party thinks their platform should be. And I tend to agree with a lot of what he's saying.

And I would hope that even if I didn't agree with anything that he was saying, I'd be all for protecting his right to say his piece. Some people/groups test our patience for that, like the Westboro Baptist Church -- ostensibly a crazy right-wing organization that just wants to get their message (of hate and bigotry) out there. But in reality they are just a bunch of con men who stir up trouble in order to provoke violent or other responses that they can start litigation over. The point is, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with idiots like that.

Threats to free speech from the other side of spectrum are much more subtle, and therefore perhaps more insidious and dangerous. For example, at about 3:00 in the video where he lists "racism, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and islamophobia" as "meaningless buzzwords". For many people, those words are NOT meaningless, but real, concrete problems that they actually have to face in their lives. Problems many orders of magnitude more significant and weighty than any of the minutia that can make or ruin our average day. Unfortunately, those words do tend to carry a lot less weight when they are bandied about willy-nilly every time we disagree with someone for any reason.

I guess, we all really do have more things in common with each other than things that separate us from each other. The frequent and extreme factionalizing and partisanship today seems very counter productive. And there's plenty of blame for that to go around.

Blah. Not impressed. The trickery is in what he's not showing. The software is treating the entire audio clip as a smart object, and it's referring to that for waveforms that it can use or manipulate to be close. Notice how he didn't show us the entire audio clip. I guarantee, he says "Jordan" and "three times" later in the audio. It's merely referencing that index where it detected those words before (speech recognition, in itself, an ancient technology, so not all that impressive), and simply copying them into the new clip. You can't just type in anything willy-nilly and expect results this good. If he typed "motherfucker caterpillar penis", it would have been nothing like this example, if it worked at all.

Look... let's all agree on this...

The american founding fathers did some really great stuff. Wonderful.

But they're fucking human, and the 2nd amendment was unbelievably short-sighted.

The constitution is not something to mess with willy-nilly, but it CAN and it SHOULD be updated from time to time.

@bareboards2
yeah.i do not understand why he was hanging around while she talked shit.

it appears he may have messed her stuff up,and was looking for something that may have dropped.

we really do not know though.could be anything.could be he gave her boobs a goose for all we know.

we DO know that she was verbally abusing him.

i know i would have walked away.i have encountered women like this all through my life.apologizing just gets you a litany of new insults,and as long as you remain in their vicinity...the insults will only continue and get even more derogatory.

walking away is the best policy.

the majority of times that sufficed to appease their inner rage demon.maybe they would throw a few zingers at my back,but i never really gave a shit.more power to her..they are just words flying out of an entitled little girl who cant behave like an adult.

but...

on a few occasions.
the girl would follow right behind me,and continue to berate and harass me.possibly seeing my retreat as a sign of weakness.i really dont know.what i DO know,is that is a blatant sign of stupidity to take your 5"3" 110lb ass and try to jam it into my face as if you were rhonda rousey.

i have never hit a woman.
but i will not allow a woman to put her hands on me,especially when she has been verbally abusive and aggressive with me.

so the girls who have thought it totally ok to escalate the situation with physical violence,i have always responded in the same fashion: they get one shot.ONE.and then i whip around (and guys who have gotten into fights understand this) and in the most threatening and physically imposing manner,plainly let her know "ok thats ONE.go ahead and hit me again.i fucking DARE you.go ahead and hit me again and see what happens.because if you hit me again you are taking the place of a man,and AS a man i will knock you the fuck out".

i actually learned that from my dad.
one of the kindest and most gentle people you will have ever met,but his advice worked like a charm.

can you guess how many of those girls went for hit # 2?

thats right...none.

ya know.people get angry.
people can misunderstand a situation and react angrily.
humans will encounter conflict throughout our lives,and it is a testament to wisdom,intelligence and patience how we deal with those conflicts.

and there is never a time where it is ok to put your hands on another person,except for in self-defense.

so when a woman puts her hands on a man.
i dont care what level the rage meter is at,she should never put her hands on him.

for a few reasons:
1.its wrong.
2.you dont get a free pass because you own a uterus.
3.violence is never the proper choice for conflict resolution.
4.and most important.would you ever in your life walk up to a grizzly bear with a stick and start poking him? would you cry and whine about the unfairness of it all when that bear rips your face off?

use a little common sense and everything will be fine.

and did ya'all catch this womans glee?
the mere idea of her male friends killing this dude made her flush with excitement.that is a tad disturbing,but expected with such low quality females such as these.

experienced a bunch of women in that category as well.

but thats a story for another day.

simply put:this woman escalated the situation by making it physical and got popped in the mouth.
and thats all it was..a pop.
got her attention though didnt it?

so advice to all my lady friends here on the sift.
you have a right to your anger,your outrage and your indignation.
you do NOT have the right to be hitting,smacking or punching guys willy nilly without consequences.

and while i agree with BB (and others) that the dude should have just walked away,i will not put that responsibility solely on him.how is it HIS responsibility to control this womans actions.she hit.she got popped.
end of story.

Well, Syriza is an acronym for Coalition of the Radical Left (roughly), and everything left of the Berlin Consensus is considered to be radical left. So they are going to call Syriza a radical leftist party until the political landscape itelf has been pulled back towards more leftist positions. But you're right, if they were judged by their positions, they'd be centre-left in theory, if centre-left hadn't turned into corporatism by taking up the Third Way of Schröder/Blair/Clinton.

They are, without a doubt, radically democratic though. As your Grauniad article points out, they haven't turned on their election promises yet, which is quite unheard of for a major European party. Francois Hollande in particular was a major letdown in this regard. Few people expected him to bow down to German demands so quickly. Aside from his 75% special tax for the rich, he dropped just about every single part of his program that could be considered socialism.

Grexit... that's a tough one.

Syriza cannot enforce any troika demands that relate to the programmes of the Chicago School of Economics. Friedman ain't welcome anymore. No cuts to wages or pensions, to privatisation of infrastructure, no cuts to the healthcare system, nor any other form of financial oppression of the lower class. That is non-negotiable. In fact, even increases in welfare programs and the healthcare system are pretty much non-negotiable. Even if Syriza wanted to put any of this on the table, and they sure as hell don't, they couldn't make it part of any deal without further damages to an already devasted democratic system in Greece.

So with that in mind, what's the point of all the negotiations?

Varoufakis' suggestions are very reasonable. The growth-linked bonds, for instance, are used very successfully all over the world in debt negotiations, as just about any bankrupty expert would testify. Like Krugman wrote today, Syriza is merely asking to "recognize the reality everyone supposedly already understands". His caveat about the German electorate is on point as well, we haven't had it explained to us yet – and we chose to ignore what little was explained to us.

Yet the troika insists on something Syriza cannot and will not provide, as just outlined above. Some of the officials still expect Syriza to acknowledge reality, to come to their senses and to accept a deal provided to them. Good luck with that, but don't hold your breath. Similarly, Varoufakis is aware that Berlin is almost guaranteed to play hardball all the way.

Of course, nothing is certain and they might strike a deal during their meeting in Wednesday that offers Greece a way out of misery. Or maybe the ECB decides that to stabilize to Euro, as is their sole purpose, they need to keep Greece within the EZ and away from default. That would allow them to back Greece, to provide them with financial support, at least until they present their program in June/July. Everything is possible. However, I see very little evidence in support of it.

Therefore Grexit might actually be just a question of who to blame it on. Syriza is not going to exit the EZ willy nilly, they need clear pressure from outside, so the record will unequivocally show that it wasn't them who made the call. No country can be thrown out, they have to leave of their own. Additionally, Merkel will not be the person to initiate the unravelling of the EU, as might be the consequence of a Grexit. That's leverage for Greece, the only leverage they have. But it has to be played right or else the blame will be put squarely on Greece, even more so than it already is.

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Edit #1: What cannot be overstated is the ability of the EZ to muddle through one crises after another, always on the brink of collapse, yet never actually collapsing. They are determined to hold this thing together, whatever the cost.
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Speaking of blame, Yves Smith linked a fantastic article the other day: Syriza and the French Indemnity of 1871-73.

The author makes a convincing case why the suppression of wages in Germany led to disaster in Spain, why it was not a choice on the part of Spain to engage in irresponsible borrowing and how it is a conflict between workers and the financial elite rather than nations. He also offers historical precedent, with Germany being the recipient of a massive cash influx, ending in a catastrophe similar to Spain's nowadays.

It strikes me as a very objective dissection of what happend, what's going on, and what needs to happen to get things back in shape. Then again, it agrees with many points I made on that BBC videos last week, so it's right within my bubble.

Palestinians fire rockets willy nilly in an attempt to kill any Jew. Jews fire rockets in attempt to kill terrorists firing rockets. Big difference. If Palestinians don't want rockets fired their way, stop firing your rockets.

Also, Turks hate Jews.

I agree- the organisers likely didn't brief her enough of the scope. The conference is a willy-nilly kumbaya for artists doing their own thing. Or agriculture.

But I dispute your points. Because I know about her and been following her for a while;
* no she doesn't get chances because she's a young lady. She's not that young and is actually very used to giving presentations;
* she's totally a public personality (yo, she presents how you should monetize on being your own brand!).

She did put in a good effort, I'll give her that. Good sport despite the slide fail. Which is still better than I can say for Michael Bay who probably had way better direction, support, and speech writers.

You don't have to be a stand-up comic. Drive one point. Be honest, genuine, and personable. And if you can't - you're not worth other people's time - politely decline the gig.

@ChaosEngine, At least take the topic seriously. You can't really think Arizona and North Waziristan have meaningful similarities, can you? If you truly know that little about tribal Pakistan then you should go read up for a long time before rejoining the conversation.

Arizona citizens pay taxes to America, cast votes for American elections and have American funded schools, roads and police. Importantly, the police in Arizona enforce the laws of the American government. Same goes for Texas. The same DOES NOT go for North Waziristan. Pakistani police don't even try to enter most of North Waziristan because the TTP would kill them.

Militants from Arizona and Texas aren't sending weekly attacks against schools and civilians throughout the rest of America, killing hundreds of people every month. Meanwhile, that is exactly what militants from North Waziristan are doing throughout Pakistan today and for a very long time now.

In the even that militants in Arizona and Texas DID commit even one such act, the American police would go in and make arrests. In North Waziristan, the police can not as stated before. More significantly though, not even the Pakistani military is willing to go in and get the militants for the casualties they would take.

You can't just willy nilly decare those situations comparable if you expect your argument to be taken seriously. Given that ground situation, it doesn't take a brilliant leap in deduction to see the very high percentage of top TTP officials hit by drones and reach the conclusion that the Pakistani military isn't entirely unhappy about the strikes.

I again repeat that dropping bombs on another nation is an act of war. You have a good point about that not being something America should be able to do lightly. You are wrong though about why Pakistan isn't declaring war back on America. It isn't fear of America, it is convenience of America JOINING their side in a civil war they are unwilling to call by name.

When looking at how much things "cost," think about "whom does it cost?" Who pays for it? Money gets 'printed' by the Federal Reserve more or less willy-nilly to pay for much of it. Who pays for that? And if it didn't 'cost' so much, would the 'printing' stop? Would the taxation stop? Or would it just mean the money will be redistributed to a different set of cronies in other industries?

i figured it best to bring the convo to your page.
i have derailed enough threads this past week alone.
would be impolite and rude to keep tramping through the china shop willy nilly.

i think i am starting to understand where you are at.
of course i am presuming,but im gonna go with frustration.
anger and outrage to what is being done to the people of syria.

i can relate to that.it is an outrage.
it is heartbreaking.

we disagree on how to proceed.
i am not here to change your mind.

i am here to talk to you as a man.
to maybe help you understand how your passionate posts may be perceived.
your last one i found impertinent,insulting and rude.

if i had to paraphrase this is how i read your last comment on the raytheon post.
"how can you all be so fucking blind?are you all a bunch of fucking pussies?dont you SEE what that man is doing?and you fucking pansies want to talk? you are all retarded,stupid and have no idea what is going on!"

i deleted half my commentary because it really was just me ripping you apart.
and that would not be fair to you and it would be just as insulting.
your post really pissed me off.
but we have talked before.
we disagree more than agree but we have always been civil and i appreciate the time you take to respond.

so the point of me coming to your page is to point out that you are talking to actual humans.
you called me a pussy.
you implied that this situation only bothers you and anybody who came to a different conclusion in regards to how to proceed in syria was not getting the plot.
was that your intent?
did you actually MEAN to imply that anybody who disagreed with a military resolution was a pansy?

well..i dont think so.
i think you are just really passionate about this and frustrated that nothing is being done.
outraged at the violence being perpetrated upon innocent people.

i feel ya.i truly do.
and i would be willing to bet the very people you chastized as being weak in their approach feel you as well.

the first thing we need to address is the fact we are all armchair quarterbacking.we have no influence nor power to dictate what happens in a country on the other side of the planet.
so basically all our bickering and arguing is a cathartic release for a situation that is horrid,horrifying and complicated.

the second is really just questions i would like to ask (and you could promptly tell me to go fuck myself).

1.how would a limited strike upon assads regime change anything that is happening on the ground?

this is really the only question you have not answered and to me it is pivotal in understanding your logic.

i have my suspicions but i await your answer.
and my apologies if i cam across snarky.
i was angry at the time.
till next time.
namaste.