It's a good measure of the values of our culture that the only argument we can make (that has even a remote change of working) against willfully causing the extinction of great numbers of species is "those species might be useful to us in the future for medicine or engineering".
I'd like to add another way of thinking of it. Several years ago I was part of a group working on a project that was composed of people from various companies. One of the attendees was blind. It became clear VERY quickly that our blind friend was light years above everyone else technically and in terms of thinking about process. He'd sit there, listen to people go back and forth on this or that issue, then come in with an incredibly intelligent and appropriate solution, time after time. He was using an audio browser to go over the project materials when we weren't working. If you don't make your services accessible to the blind, YOU might be the one missing the benefit of this type of person's input.
I worry about the effects on my eardrums of 5-6 hours of wearing headphones....try to limit it to 2 hours max. So really, the optimal solution to me is to work in a non-cubicle scenario that has everyone in small offices of 1-2 people. If I were setting up an office, that would be the preferred arrangement.
Care to source that? Anyway, the point is there's something wrong when capital income is taxed at half the rate of labor income. In particular, taxing carried interest income that low is especially egregious. Private equity and VC partners that are earning a guaranteed % of funds under management annually are NOT taking a risk.
Because one half of the political system is stridently opposed to infrastructure spending and wants to pour all available government investment into the military.
$1 trillion in student loan debt you say? Simple solution, let the Fed print up and loan out 0% interest loans that roll over indefinitely and hand them out to students, just like the $16 trillion they handed out to the banks.
Oh wait, I forgot only bankers get free money in America.
Serious solution: repeal the law that says student loan debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Then lenders will need to do a serious assessment of whether the money they are loaning out can be paid back based on assessing the student.
I will also like to mention that somehow other nations seem to not require massive tuition fees. A basic college education should be MUCH lower cost.
They need someone who actually knows and cares about product development. Job one to me is to fix yahoo mail, which is just horrendous. They have good market share but it is so much worse than Gmail it is an embarrassment.
Of course, we all know that isn't going to happen. They will hire another suit who will continue the destruction of a once-great internet company.
Actually packaged food companies do, in fact, employ teams of scientists to make their food products as addictive as possible via sophisticated flavor engineering. Rense has a good excerpt from the book fast food nation discussing this here http://www.rense.com/general7/whyy.htm .
There isn't a need for a single international treaty to deal with this. Simply levy import tariffs on products by companies who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, or use slave labor, shoddy environmental practices, etc. The means is there and can be implemented tomorrow. What is lacking is the political push to make it happen.
Despite your sarcasm, do you have any evidence of nations who have no import restrictions or government subsidies and have built up a competency? China and India are notorious for their import controls, so those are off the table for you to use. And don't use the US technology industry, which has been massively subsidized by government research, import controls, and purchasing. Hey, even the US sugar industry benefits massively from tariffs; without them it would have to compete with much lower priced product from warmer nations.
Well maybe companies should start thinking about what it takes to retain employees? Perhaps start retirement programs that incentivize people to stay with them for a number of years. As far as I can see in the economy, you are wrong. The real issue is viewing "human resources" as disposable, plug-and-play things that you use to fill stopgap needs, not some desire by employees to job-hop all the time. A lot of people, especially when they start to settle down with a mortgage and/or kids, would probably love to have employment stability.
Well then maybe they shouldn't have been using pavement and even more to the point, not packing people into cities. We should spread out and use things like horses because they are an environmental free lunch compared to the insanity of extracting fossil fuels so that fat assholes can sit in traffic for 2 hours a day to go sit in an office.
I agree with the concept of a future without cars. However, this is one of these areas where an entire discussion can go on with mostly Americans and our willingness to look at how other nations do things means we do a lot of incredibly stupid stuff.
Look, we need to just do whatever Mexico and a huge number of nations do and allow local collectivos with trucks etc. to give rides around town. It's fine to say we should do this or that in the future but our transportation is laid out like it is. It's freaking difficult to get around the US without a car. We've built nearly all of our cities and towns in a way dominated by cars and roads. So buses and trucks are the way to go.
I think the real problem with RSS uptake is there's a lack of the 2-way discoverability that goes on with twitter. When you follow someone on twitter (or facebook) the feed originator knows who is following them and can follow back. Also the ease of @username messaging isn't there with RSS.
The whole self-driving car thing seems insane to me. How about, good public transportation? I don't see the point of people sitting in individual metal boxes when buses and the like do the job much more effectively. The real problem is with how we build communities in the US, spread out and car dependent. Walkable communities are a much better way to do things, which means increased density.
Yes clearly that is what the article author is suggesting. However, this core concept, that humans should / will start genetically engineering ourselves, needs much more discussion and thought before being charged ahead into. Because remember, its not so easy to unshit the bed once genetic material is released into the world. For instance, farmed fish that are cloned as well as gmo corn have been shown to reproduce with native species, forever changing the population. The ethics of doing such a thing are highly suspect, much less involving humans. There should be a much more mature discussion prior to any such serious efforts to monkey with the human genome, particularly on a wide scale.