Divorce Your Car --and get into a relationship with a Bike!

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Cubicles kill, real jobs don't.

LOL! There is something to that- not only in terms of physical health
but also in terms of mental and spiritual health. I heard a term last
week that I had never run across befo "cubicle farms."

I did work in one and that term fits it to a T. I could stand up and
throw a piece of paper into the appropriate square and hit someone in
the head with a message, so who needed e-mail??? H.P. was a 2,000 person
cubicle farm.
Bill Baka

Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the world's
population gets its food now? From small farms. Large scale
agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed countries
which feeds a fraction of the world's population regularly, and which
does provide emergency capacity when food production fails in
ecologically difficult areas due to drought, flooding, fires, etc. In
the latter case, large scale farming does save lives. However, 75% of
the world's population is not all going to suffer such catastrophes at
once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where the
United States is going to top 300 million around October 15. Compared to
the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150 million too many.
We are paving over everything, quite literally. I went to visit the
houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the corn fields I grew up
playing in are now built over with housing or "Condo-fields". If we keep
replacing corn with people we are going to be in deeper **** than we are
now. Rolling the global population to about 1 billion (max) and keeping
it there with some no growth thinking is about the only way the human
race will be here in another 200 years. I think we are setting ourselves
up far a mass plague or starvation that is going to thin out the
population. We just plain doesn't need so many people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that 75%
of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1 chance
of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have every
bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as I
have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility impairment
hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order to qualify if
people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt, but nobody gets
to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.

I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:

1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops increasing
2) That children never feed their parents

If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more nations
become industrialized, population will level off or even decline. The
reason we have such extreme population growth now is that we have better
education, health care, food production, and food distribution. So
mortality is down.

Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby here
and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a whole
pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease is
down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed countries
just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
food. Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we
are too busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all
the immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
India are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep
bleeding money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX" superpower.

Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world, children are
often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to get food. So in
that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet children" who are not
expected to return any value to the family in the way we do in the US. So
people in developing nations tend to reproduce more because they need the
additional hands and because of higher infant and child mortality rates.

You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much is
that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far away
land, thus making it our problem.

Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly reduces
mortality among infants and children, so population will initially spike as
education becomes available.

Uh-huh!

But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng peoples
slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more benefits of
education. This extends the childhood years, and people begin to reproduce
less. In addition, since the children are spending all their time learning,
they are not an asset to the household, but a drain on it until they become
productive in their teens or twenties. At which time they are themselves
ready to reproduce, so they split off into their own households *and never
return any value to the parent household.*

And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So if we
really want to control population we need to educate, educate, educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't you.

Bill Baka

In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

bill wrote:
Genetically modified foods are and have been a fact of life for
hundreds of years through selective breeding and grafting of
orchard trees. Don't fool yourself that just because a scientist
did it in a lab it is any different, cause it ain't what grows
in the wild.
Tim wrote:
There is a difference between selective breeding and
hybridization, and sticking fish genes in a tomato.
Still, people should not worry about growing strange body parts or
anything. Why should it be immoral or "Against God's wishs" if an
improvement is found in a DNA lab?

IMHO it's not about being moral or against God's wishes (not being
a Believer, I don't think in those terms). It's about introducing
unknowns into the environment that were formerly impossible by
natural selection. We don't know the potential adverse
consequences. What if genetic modification of a food results in a
prion-mediated disease that takes a decade to show symptoms?
Millions of people could be affected before the problem was known.

Take it in stride. You don't know what you are inhaling every time
you ride in traffic either. Remember the MTBE fiasco about 5 years
ago? Some of the gas stations were putting "MTBE Free" in bigger
letters than their prices, as if that was the biggest selling point.
Industry puts plenty of unknowns into the environment and we never
know until some focus group makes a big stink over it. Life goes on.

Except for the focus groups often having a very good point. MTBE is a
bad thing once it gets into groundwater. Groundwater is a rather
important thing, after all. I'm not willing to buy the James Watt
vision of the world, being "it doesn't matter if we chop all the trees
down because God's going to end the world anyway and save the
righteous." Granted we have another one of these nuts in office now,
surrounded by an administration that is loyal not to him but to the vast
interests they served in the private sector. Just follow the money and
the smell of cigars.

Of course, this can happen without genetic modification, too.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons ate BSE-infected beef products,
but fortunately human susceptibility to the prion appears to be
rare and cases of vCJD have numbered below 200 as far as I know.
About 800 BSE-infected cattle are thought to have gone to market in
the U.S., although this is a mathematical projection due to the FDA
and USDA basically refusing to do competent testing over the past 6
years. It's more important to them to protect rich cattle
interests than the public health.

I can't argue about the 'Competency' of the FDA or USDA since both
are afraid to rattle the rich farmers too much.

It's not "rich farmers" so much as the rich middlemen such as Tyson's,
Cargill, etc. There aren't very many rich farmers. There are a lot of
rich middlemen who can afford their own senators.

In many cases, genetically modified organisms are solutions in
search of a problem. They are a supply-side phenomenon and are
quite unnecessary as far as food goes.

Most of the GMOs that I have read about are modified to withstand a
particular plant disease or to survive long periods without water, or
something like that. There is a need or some foods might not be
available at all.

This os one of the failures of the Green Revolution, the proponents of
which never fail to blow their own horns while overlooking the tragic
consequences in many parts of the world. The Green Revolution
introduced inappropriate crops to places all over the world, which
required technologies and inputs that were not going to be reliably
available. Basically they tried to Americanize agriculture in places
where American agricultural practices are not appropriate. Now the
effort is to make up for that failure with GM crops, rather than having
been more intelligent in the first place and helping develop locally
appropriate agricultural practices.

There is a better argument for using GMOs to produce medicines
(most insulin is now produced by GMO bacteria to closely mimic
human insulin; previously diabetics used animal insulins extracted
from pigs, cows, horses, etc.).

I read a lot on that and one of the technical journals I have a
subscription to states that they are now looking at ocean organisms
right down to the single celled plankton and finding all kinds of
naturally occurring 'interesting' compounds. It used to be the rain
forests, but now that it is more profitable to burn them to grow beef
for McDonalds that is kind of fading into history.

The testing for medicines is far more stringent and the risk of
GMOs getting released into the wild is far far lower. And GMOs may
be useful for other technologies such as nanotechnology.

The amount of research and computerization would surprise you. The
big Pharma companies are searching through 100's of thousands of
compounds weekly and tossing the ones that don't fit the bill for the
one thing they are looking for. If something doesn't just happen to
be effective at curing AIDs or Cancer or one of the money pit
diseases they will just toss the formula, and not consider that it
may cure the common cold. Lots of waste going on, and they don't like
to share, so another company might discover 5 years down the road a
miracle cure that one company tossed out.

Bush is the biggest enemy of research right now, since that fool
thinks stem cell research is immoral. Good thing that after November
he will be a real "Lame duck". Worst president in my lifetime, except
maybe Truman. Bill Baka

Hmm, I was born in 1959 so my perspective is different. Bush is the
worst President in my lifetime, followed closely by Ronald Reagan.
Personally I do not believe the Democrats will regain control of either
the House or the Senate. The absence of leadership on any issue on that
side of the aisle will doom them to failure yet again, as people will
choose the devil they know. The Democrats have just not offered an
alternative vision to vote for, unlike the Republicans in 1994, who
understood that it isn't enough to hope that the voters will vote
against the other side and vote you in by default.

"bill" wrote in message
m...
And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So if
we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
you.

While he be educatin', everybody else be fornicatin'.

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

bill wrote:
Genetically modified foods are and have been a fact of life for
hundreds of years through selective breeding and grafting of
orchard trees. Don't fool yourself that just because a scientist
did it in a lab it is any different, cause it ain't what grows
in the wild.
Tim wrote:
There is a difference between selective breeding and
hybridization, and sticking fish genes in a tomato.
Still, people should not worry about growing strange body parts or
anything. Why should it be immoral or "Against God's wishs" if an
improvement is found in a DNA lab?
IMHO it's not about being moral or against God's wishes (not being
a Believer, I don't think in those terms). It's about introducing
unknowns into the environment that were formerly impossible by
natural selection. We don't know the potential adverse
consequences. What if genetic modification of a food results in a
prion-mediated disease that takes a decade to show symptoms?
Millions of people could be affected before the problem was known.
Take it in stride. You don't know what you are inhaling every time
you ride in traffic either. Remember the MTBE fiasco about 5 years
ago? Some of the gas stations were putting "MTBE Free" in bigger
letters than their prices, as if that was the biggest selling point.
Industry puts plenty of unknowns into the environment and we never
know until some focus group makes a big stink over it. Life goes on.

Except for the focus groups often having a very good point. MTBE is a
bad thing once it gets into groundwater. Groundwater is a rather
important thing, after all. I'm not willing to buy the James Watt
vision of the world, being "it doesn't matter if we chop all the trees
down because God's going to end the world anyway and save the
righteous."

James "Dumb-Ass" Watt.
I never read anything written by an obvious moron.

Granted we have another one of these nuts in office now,
surrounded by an administration that is loyal not to him but to the vast
interests they served in the private sector. Just follow the money and
the smell of cigars.

Heh, heh.
I can't wait until the November mid-term elections that should make him
a dead in the water president.

Of course, this can happen without genetic modification, too.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons ate BSE-infected beef products,
but fortunately human susceptibility to the prion appears to be
rare and cases of vCJD have numbered below 200 as far as I know.
About 800 BSE-infected cattle are thought to have gone to market in
the U.S., although this is a mathematical projection due to the FDA
and USDA basically refusing to do competent testing over the past 6
years. It's more important to them to protect rich cattle
interests than the public health.
I can't argue about the 'Competency' of the FDA or USDA since both
are afraid to rattle the rich farmers too much.

It's not "rich farmers" so much as the rich middlemen such as Tyson's,
Cargill, etc. There aren't very many rich farmers. There are a lot of
rich middlemen who can afford their own senators.

Yeah, you got that right, and Tyson's is one brand I won't touch since
finding a bunch of it spoiled and still on the shelves at a Safeway
years ago.

In many cases, genetically modified organisms are solutions in
search of a problem. They are a supply-side phenomenon and are
quite unnecessary as far as food goes.
Most of the GMOs that I have read about are modified to withstand a
particular plant disease or to survive long periods without water, or
something like that. There is a need or some foods might not be
available at all.

This os one of the failures of the Green Revolution, the proponents of
which never fail to blow their own horns while overlooking the tragic
consequences in many parts of the world. The Green Revolution
introduced inappropriate crops to places all over the world, which
required technologies and inputs that were not going to be reliably
available. Basically they tried to Americanize agriculture in places
where American agricultural practices are not appropriate. Now the
effort is to make up for that failure with GM crops, rather than having
been more intelligent in the first place and helping develop locally
appropriate agricultural practices.

Years ago I read that the lowly Cherry tomato, which will grow almost
anywhere could help to solve world hunger, and I can attest to that. I
had a half acre yard that I planted some Cherry tomatoes on and within a
few months I had so many every week I was begging the neighbors to take
them by the bucket full. If I could have eaten that many tomatoes I
never would have had to buy food again, but short of starving, you can
only take so much of any one thing.

There is a better argument for using GMOs to produce medicines
(most insulin is now produced by GMO bacteria to closely mimic
human insulin; previously diabetics used animal insulins extracted
from pigs, cows, horses, etc.).
I read a lot on that and one of the technical journals I have a
subscription to states that they are now looking at ocean organisms
right down to the single celled plankton and finding all kinds of
naturally occurring 'interesting' compounds. It used to be the rain
forests, but now that it is more profitable to burn them to grow beef
for McDonalds that is kind of fading into history.

The testing for medicines is far more stringent and the risk of
GMOs getting released into the wild is far far lower. And GMOs may
be useful for other technologies such as nanotechnology.
The amount of research and computerization would surprise you. The
big Pharma companies are searching through 100's of thousands of
compounds weekly and tossing the ones that don't fit the bill for the
one thing they are looking for. If something doesn't just happen to
be effective at curing AIDs or Cancer or one of the money pit
diseases they will just toss the formula, and not consider that it
may cure the common cold. Lots of waste going on, and they don't like
to share, so another company might discover 5 years down the road a
miracle cure that one company tossed out.

Bush is the biggest enemy of research right now, since that fool
thinks stem cell research is immoral. Good thing that after November
he will be a real "Lame duck". Worst president in my lifetime, except
maybe Truman. Bill Baka

Hmm, I was born in 1959 so my perspective is different. Bush is the
worst President in my lifetime, followed closely by Ronald Reagan.

Roger that.

Personally I do not believe the Democrats will regain control of either
the House or the Senate.

Been watching the news lately? I thing Foley just handed both houses to
the Democrats. The voters aren't totally stupid and I think they will
realize that the Republicans could care less about family values other
than talking about it at election time.

The absence of leadership on any issue on that
side of the aisle will doom them to failure yet again, as people will
choose the devil they know. The Democrats have just not offered an
alternative vision to vote for, unlike the Republicans in 1994, who
understood that it isn't enough to hope that the voters will vote
against the other side and vote you in by default.

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show and
played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor that
neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a stick up
their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she gets my vote,
Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think 2004 just showed
how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way could Kerry have
lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.
Bill Baka

Ludmila Borgschatz-Thudpucker, MD wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
m...
And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So if
we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
you.

While he be educatin', everybody else be fornicatin'.


Didn't anyone notice that the rich types have one or two kids so they
have "Heirs", while the welfare class has more kids to get a raise?
Bill Baka

On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 11:42:01 -0700, bill wrote:

Amy Blankenship wrote:
"bill" wrote in message
...
Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article .net,
"george conklin" wrote:

Small farms would condemn about 75% of the current world's
population to death. That is not a solution except for death.
I don't know if the 75% is correct but the basic idea is sound.
No, it's not. Where do you think 75% (actually more) of the
world's population gets its food now? From small farms. Large
scale agribusiness farming is the purview of economically developed
countries which feeds a fraction of the world's population
regularly, and which does provide emergency capacity when food
production fails in ecologically difficult areas due to drought,
flooding, fires, etc. In the latter case, large scale farming does
save lives. However, 75% of the world's population is not all
going to suffer such catastrophes at once.
75% of the world's population is surplus anyway. I just read where
the United States is going to top 300 million around October 15.
Compared to the country (this one) I grew up in that is about 150
million too many. We are paving over everything, quite literally. I
went to visit the houses I grew up in, back in Illinois and all the
corn fields I grew up playing in are now built over with housing or
"Condo-fields". If we keep replacing corn with people we are going
to be in deeper **** than we are now. Rolling the global population
to about 1 billion (max) and keeping it there with some no growth
thinking is about the only way the human race will be here in
another 200 years. I think we are setting ourselves up far a mass
plague or starvation that is going to thin out the population. We
just plain doesn't need so many people.
I suspect that there are points of agreement that we could find, but
there are also points of disagreement. For example, your claim that
75% of the population is "surplus." Of course, that gives you a 4:1
chance of being one of the surplus ones. ;-) I agree that there is
overpopulation not only in America but around the world as well. I
cannot bring myself to call anyone "surplus," however. They have
every bit as much right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
as I have.
My actual solution was to ship food to them that had fertility
impairment hormones in it or mandate a vasectomy or tube tie in order
to qualify if people already had 2 or more children. Nobody gets hurt,
but nobody gets to have 10 kids they can't feed, either.
I think you're operating under two fundamental misconceptions:
1) That civilizations never reach a point where population stops
increasing
2) That children never feed their parents
If you look at the most developed nations, population growth through
reproduction is in the near-zero to negative range, depending on which
country you're talking about. This implies that as more and more
nations become industrialized, population will level off or even
decline. The reason we have such extreme population growth now is that
we have better education, health care, food production, and food
distribution. So mortality is down.

Way off base for the US. We get one pregnant Mexican having a baby here
and the whole illegal family stays, so that one 'Citizen' gives a whole
pre-existing family the right to stay here. Mortality due to disease is
down from what it used to be, but then people in non-developed countries
just have more children who then starve and of course, we send them
food. Us Natural born Americans don't have that many children because we
are too busy working to survive the high cost of living to support all
the immigrants who we have to support through social programs. China and
India are both over 1 Billion and will keep going as long as we keep
bleeding money to them, which will eventually make us the "EX"
superpower.

For the U.S., it's a birth rate of 14.14 natural born Americans per 1,000
population compared to a death rate of 8.26 deaths of both natural born
and immigrant Americans per 1,000 population ( C.I.A. 2006 est. ). I'm
sure the rest of your info is just as accurate.

Now let's look at the second premise. In the developing world,
children are often valuable hands to produce food and/or the means to
get food. So in that sense, developing nations can't afford "pet
children" who are not expected to return any value to the family in the
way we do in the US. So people in developing nations tend to reproduce
more because they need the additional hands and because of higher
infant and child mortality rates.

You don't read much, do you? The reason they try to reproduce so much is
that there is a high rate of infant death caused by the birth of a new
child. Once there is a new baby to breast feed the next older one is
expected to survive on adult food and often dies from malnutrition.
Our answer to this? Throw money at them or "Adopt" a child in a far away
land, thus making it our problem.

Small amounts of education, especially for female children, greatly
reduces mortality among infants and children, so population will
initially spike as education becomes available.

Uh-huh!
But this makes the benefits of education tangible, so developng
peoples slowly spend more and more time in school in order to reap more
benefits of education. This extends the childhood years, and people
begin to reproduce less. In addition, since the children are spending
all their time learning, they are not an asset to the household, but a
drain on it until they become productive in their teens or twenties.
At which time they are themselves ready to reproduce, so they split off
into their own households *and never return any value to the parent
household.*
And this is exactly why as nations develop, population levels off. So
if we really want to control population we need to educate, educate,
educate.

You really do believe the view through your rose colored glasses, don't
you.

Bill Baka

In article ,
bill wrote:

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.

Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting irregularities
that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both cases, the
election came down to a state where the person in charge of the vote was
also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be in charge of the
Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases, neither of the
Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the ethical wisdom to
recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or alternatively to stay out
of involvement in the Bush campaigns in those states.

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't cast
in the first place.

Tim McNamara wrote:
In article ,
bill wrote:

Clinton got my attention when he showed up on the Arsenio Hall show
and played his Saxophone in 1992, so he had a certain 'cool' factor
that neither Bush has had. Since 1980 we have had Republicans with a
stick up their ass, so I think change is due. If Hillary runs, she
gets my vote, Gore really won the popular vote in 2000, and I think
2004 just showed how a corrupt party can manipulate the votes. No way
could Kerry have lost that badly when Bush was already unpopular.

Gore did win the popular vote in 2000, including Florida, and should
have won the election. In 2004 there were massive voting
irregularities that tipped the election from Kerry to Bush. In both
cases, the election came down to a state where the person in charge
of the vote was also an ambitious Republican that happened to also be
in charge of the Bush campaigns for those states. In both cases,
neither of the Secretaries of State of Florida and Ohio had the
ethical wisdom to recuse themselves from certifying the vote, or
alternatively to stay out of involvement in the Bush campaigns in
those states.

The Diebold problem makes it certain that the 2006 and 2008 election
results will not be reliable. Not to mention Republican strategies
across the country to make sure that likely Democratic votes aren't
cast in the first place.

Why are Democrats against tamper-proof voter ID cards? Why are they against
letting illegal aliens vote? Why do they pay homeless and indigent people
to vote? Why do their dead people keep voting? TWICE? LOL

Maybe this time some forged documents and last-minute "news" (like a
decades-old DUI charge released 5 days before the election) will work
/against/ the Dems. Hell, it's just hardball politics, right?!?

Bill Sornson wrote:
Why are Democrats against tamper-proof voter ID cards? Why are they
against letting illegal aliens vote?

Bzzt. Meant they're against /preventing/ illegals from voting. My bad.