Ok I'll try to divide up my wall text a bit better this time

I totally acknowledge that people in the past, and even in present day, some people have to live a certain way in order to survive, but for the vast majority of people that doesn't apply.


Taste:
Like most of the senses in the human body, the sense of taste is in a constant state re-calibration. It's highly subjective and easily influenced over mere seconds but also long periods of time. They say it takes 3 weeks to acclimatize from things you crave, from salt to heroin. That's why most healthy eating books tell you go to cold tofurkey (see what I did there ) for 3 weeks. It's all about the brain chemistry. After 3 straight weeks you aren't craving it. (The habit might still be there but, the chemically driven cravings are gone).
Try it yourself by eating an apple before and after some soft drink. First the apple will taste sweet, and after it will taste sour. Or try decreasing salt over a 3 week period, it'll taste bland at first, but if you go back after 3 weeks it'll be way too salty.



Food science:
One of the major things stopping me from not being vegan, was the health concerns, so I read a number of books about plant-based eating.
There is a new book "How Not To Die" by Dr. Michael Greger. If you want scientific proof of a plant based diet this the one stop shop. 500 pages explaining tens of thousands of studies, some going for decades and involving hundreds of thousands of people. I was blown away at the simple fact that so many studies get done. Most of them are interventional studies also, meaning they are able to show cause and effect (unlike observational or corrolational studies, as he explains in the book). 150 pages of this book alone are lists of references to studies. It's pure unbiased science. (It's not a vegan book either in case you are worried about him being biased).

At the risk of spoiling the book - whole foods like apples and broccoli doesn't give you cancer, in fact they go a long way to preventing it, some bean based foods are as effective as chemotherapy, and without the side effects. I thought it sounded it ridiculous, but the science is valid.
Of course you can visit his website he explains all new research almost daily at nutritionfacts.org in 1 or 2 minute videos.
He also has a checklist phone app called Dr.Greger's Daily Dozen.

There are other authors too, most of these ones have recipes too, such as Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Neal Barnard, Dr. Cadwell Esselstyn, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr Joel Furhman.
Health-wise it's the best thing you can do for yourself. And if like me you thought eating healthy meant salads, you'd be as wrong as I was I haven't had a salad for years. My blood results and vitamin levels are exactly what the books said they would be.

Try it for 3 weeks, but make sure you do it the right way as explained in the books, and you'll be shouting from roof tops about what a change it's made to your life. The other thing is, you get to eat more, and the more you eat it's healthier. What a weird concept in a world where we are constantly being told to calorie count (it doesn't work btw).

Environmental:
I've read a lot about ethics, reason and evidence based thinking, as well as nutrition and health (as a result of my own skepticism). So I could and I enjoy talking about these all day long. On the environmental side of things, I'm not as aware, but there some documentaries such as Earthlings and Cowspiracy which paint a pretty clear picture.
Anyone can do the maths even at a rough level - there are 56 billion animals bred and slaughtered each year. Feeding 56 billion animals (many of which are bigger than people) takes a lot more food than a mere 7 billion. Therefore it must take more crops and land to feed them, not to mention the land the animals occupy themselves, as well as the land they destroy by dump their waste products (feces are toxic in those concentrations, where as plant waste, is just compost)
The other thing is that many of these crops are grown in countries where people are starving, using up the fertile land to feed our livestock instead of the people. How f'd up is that?
It's reasons like that why countries like the Netherlands are asking their people to not eat meat more than 3 meals a week.

Productivity and economics:
Countries like Finland have government assistance to switch farmers from dairy to berry. Because they got sick of being sick:
http://nutritionfacts.org/video/dietary-guidelines-from-dairies-to-berries/

The world won't go vegan overnight, and realistically it will never be 100% vegan (people still smoke after all). There will be more than enough time to transition. And surely you aren't suggesting that we should eat meat and dairy to keep someone employed? I don't want anyone to lose their job, but to do something pointlessly cruel just to keep a person working seems wrong.

Animal industries are also heavily subsidized in many countries, so if they were to stop being subsidized that's money freed up for other projects, such as the ones in Finland.

The last bit:
If you eat a plant based diet, just like the cow you'll never have constipation, thanks to all of the fibre
When it comes to enzymes, humans are lactose intolerant because after the age of 2 the enzyme lactase stops being made by the body (unless you keep drinking it). Humans also don't have another enzyme called uricase (true omnivores, and carnivores do), which is the enzyme used to break down the protein called uric acid. As you might know gout is caused by too much uric acid, forming crystals in your joints.
However humans have a multitude of enzymes for digesting carbohydrate rich foods (plants). And no carbs don't make fat despite what the fitness industry would have you believe (as the books above explain).
Appealing to history as well, when they found fossilized human feces, it contained so much fibre it was obvious that humans ate primarily a plant based diet. (Animal foods don't contain fibre).

The reasons why you wouldn't want a whale to eat krill for you is:
1. Food is a packaged deal - there is nothing harmful in something like a potato. But feed a lot of potatoes to a pig, and eat the pig, you're getting some of the nutrients of a potato, but also heaps of stuff you're body doesn't need from the pig, like cholesterol, saturated fat, sulfur and methionine containing amino acids etc And no fibre. (low fibre means constipation and higher rates of colon cancer).
2. Your body's health is also dependent on the bacteria living inside you. (fun fact, most the weight of your poop is bacteria!) The bacteria inside you needs certain types of food to live. If you eat meat, you're starving your micro-organisms, and the less good bacteria you have, the less they produce certain chemicals and nutrients , and you get a knock on effect. The fewer the good bacteria also makes room for bad bacteria which make chemicals you don't want.
Coincidentally, if you eat 3 potatoes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you have all the protein you need - it worked for Matt Damon on Mars right?

Gravitational Waves Jam has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

PLUTO MARS - Outbound Probe (A Capella Science) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Puffed Up Cores has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Bohemian Gravity! has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

A Capella Science - Rolling in the Higgs has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579.

As Charles De Mar aptly stated in the 1985 film, Better Off Dead -

"Get the lead out. That is all."

Now I'll go back to my lighter fluid eggnog.

Three pieces for your entertainment:

The Grauniad ran an opinion piece by former NYT executive editor Jill Abramson abtly titled "This may shock you: Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest". The headline is enough to make my head spin, nevermind the content. Not worth spending time on, really. You can guess what the comment section thought of it. Not surprisingly, it was closed after an hour.

Worth a read, however, is a recent polemic by Sean Kerrigan: Will We Elect Hillary After Her Many, Many War Crimes?

What made me laugh was this: the supposed presidential frontrunner would have been hanged if judged by the standards set at the Nuremberg Trials, yet Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, holds a fundraiser for Clinton at $350k per pair for seats at her majesty's table. Who the hell needs satire anyway, not even Doug Stanhope could come up with most of the twisted shit reality confronts us with day in, day out.

Last but not least, Robert Fisk wonders why neither Cameron nor Obama seem to be celebrating the retaking of Palmyra from the IS.

"Here are the Syrian army, backed, of course, by Vladimir Putin's Russkies, chucking the clowns of Isis out of town, and we daren't utter a single word to say well done."

Continuum season one is ok, but don't bother watching the rest cause it sucks. there's a great new sci-fi show called The Expanse and I've also been watching The Colony which is quite promising so far ... As for Life on Mars I'd recommend watching the british version. I found Limitless extremely boring and unimaginative, didn't watch it past episode two
btw -- Choggie, are you there, you reading this? I miss your cajun cooking videos on yt

Constant 1G acceleration followed by constant 1 G deceleration gets you to Mars in about 50-75 hours, and you never get anywhere near relativistic velocity. It's just a matter of scalability. If you develop an engine that can accelerate a given mass at. 001g, and it's made light enough that most of that mass is payload, you just scale up with an array of 1000 of them and you're at 1G.

I'm confused. They imply a 3 day trip to mars is possible, but is that at the maximum speed photonic propulsion can deliver, or do they include the acceleration and deceleration times? As I understood it, photonic propulsion can deliver extreme speeds, but only at a minimal acceleration. That means that maximum speed is much faster, but accelerating to that speed takes immensely longer, and the same goes for deceleration. Maybe they've invented a new method I've not heard of with much higher acceleration, but that's not really mentioned in the video.
They actually seem to imply they plan to use the same tech as cyclotrons, which means essentially a huge rail gun (and that's not photonic propulsion BTW, it's magnetic). Again, the amount of propulsion is miniscule, but the top speed is high with that method. Yes, you can expel matter at near speed of light, but only in tiny amounts and using huge amounts of energy.
Yes, it may take 10 minutes to achieve 30% the speed of light....with single molecules or atoms.
There are MANY reasons why we can't do this at macro sizes. Just look at the size of a cyclotron needed to accelerate an atom to those relativistic speeds. Now think about sizing that up to accelerate enough matter to move a spaceship instead of a single atom and it's likely near the size of the entire planet. We won't be building a cyclotron that size ever, nor will we likely ever shrink the accelerators to a size where they can fit inside a spaceship to shoot trillions of atoms out like a light speed gun. They are just too big and use too much power. Maybe once fusion is perfected and miniaturization also perfected it could work for interstellar travel, but never for local space travel, the acceleration levels are just too small.
Also, it seems solar sails give the same or better acceleration to the same top speeds without the impossible technology....but they don't work too well for stopping except at other stars.

@greatgooglymoogly

Thanks for taking the time to watch it.

Like I said in my previous comment, this talk needs to take a lot of shortcuts, otherwise its length would surpass anyone's attention span.

So, point by point.

By "balanced budget", I suppose you refer to the federal budget. A balanced budget is not neccessarily a bad thing, but it is undesirable in most case. The key reason is sectoral balances. The economy can divided into three sectors: public, private, foreign. Since one person's spending is another person's income, the sum of all spending and income of these three sectors is zero by definition.

More precisely: if the public sector runs a surplus and the private sector runs a surplus, the foreign sector needs to run a deficit of a corresponding size.

Two examples:
- the government runs a balanced budget, no surplus, no deficit
- the private sector runs a surplus (savings) of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 2% of GDP (your country runs a current account surplus of 2% of GDP)

- the government runs a deficit of 2% of GDP
- the foreign sector runs a surplus of 3% (your current account deficit of 3%)
- your private sector must, by definition, run a deficit of 1% of GDP, aka burn through savings or run up debt

If you intend to allow the private sector to net save, you need to run either a current account surplus or a public sector deficit, or both. Since we don't export goods to Mars just yet, not all countries can run current account surpluses, so you need to run a public sector deficit if you want your private sector to net save. No two ways about it.

Germany runs a balanced public budget, sort of, and its private sector net saves. But that comes at the cost of a current account surplus to the tune of €250B. That's 250 billion Euros worth of debt other countries have to accumulate so that both the private and public sector in Germany can avoid deficits. Parasitic is what I'd call this behaviour, and I'm German.

If you feel ambitious, you could try to have both surplus and deficit within the private sector by allowing households to net save while "forcing" corporations to run the corresponding deficits. But to any politician trying that, I'd advise to avoid air travel.

As for the "devaluation of the currency", see my previous comment.

Also, she didn't use real numbers, because a) the talk is short and numbers kill people's attention rather quickly, and b) it's a policy decision to use debt to finance a deficit. One might just as well monetise it, like I explained in my previous comment.

Helicopter money would be quite helpful these days, actually. Even monetarists like AEP say so. If fiscal policy is off the table (deficit hawkery), what else are you left with...

As for your question related to the Fed, let me quote Eric Tymoigne on why MMT views both central bank and Treasury as part of the consolidated government:

"MMT authors tend to like to work with a consolidated government because they see it as an effective strategy for policy purpose (see next section), but also because the unconsolidated case just hides under layers of institutional complexity the main point: one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always. This monetary financing is not an option and is not by itself inflationary."

MMT principle: the central bank needs to be under democratic control, aka be part of government. The Fed in particular can pride itself on its independance all it wants, it still cannot fulfill any of its goals without the Treasury's help. It cannot diverge from government policies too long. Unlike the ECB, which is a nightmare in its construction.

Anyway, what does he mean by "one way or another the Fed finances the Treasury, always"? Well, the simple case is debt monetisation, direct financing. However, the Fed also participates by ensuring that Primary Dealers have enough reserves to make a reasonable bid on treasuries. The Fed makes sure that auctions of treasuries will always succeed. Always. Either by providing reserves to ensure buyers can afford the treasuries, by replacing maturing treasuries or buying them outright. No chance whatsoever for bond vigilantes. Betting against treasuries is pointless, you will always lose.

But what about taxation as a means to finance the Treasury? Well, the video's Monopoly example illustrated quite nicely, you cannot collect taxes until you have spent currency into circulation. Spending comes before taxation, it does not depend on it. Until reserves are injected into the banking system, either by the Fed through asset purchases or the Treasury through spending, taxes cannot be paid. Again, monetary financing is not optional. If the Treasury borrows money from the public, it borrows back money it previously spent.

Yes, I ignored the distribution of wealth, taxation, the fixation on growth and a million other things. That's a different discussion.

Sheesh, you'd think his time on Mars would have mellowed him.

I promoted two videos about 13 hours ago and they are still promoted.

http://videosift.com/video/EMBRACE-OF-THE-SERPENT-Trailer
http://videosift.com/video/Jamming-with-my-pipe-buddy

This one was also promoted over 3 hours ago and is still promoted
http://videosift.com/video/Sarah-Blasko-covers-David-Bowies-Life-On-Mars

@siftbot must of passed out. I think we need to do an intervention.

-edit-
Also videos aren't pqing after 2 days. Preventing sifters from submitting new videos due to full unsifted slots.

I don't know about giving it a "fail" on gravity, but a "cheat" on the storm. If you are willing to give it a "cheat" on the storm, then the reality of filming on Earth should give the gravity a "cheat" as well. It would have been much much harder to replicate the gravity on Mars itself and maintain any sort of sense of budget etc. I'd be more inclined to fail it for the storm than the gravity, the storm is a cheat to setup the story, the gravity is a cheat due to the reality of filming on Earth.