Scientists that work for the government who have based their careers upon global warming.

Governments that receive more money based upon the hype of global warming (see terrorism for military funding).

There is a very low percentage of alcoholics that kick alcohol through AA. The people I believe it works for is those that value being part of a group that accepts them more than they value drinking. Kinda like people who get involved in a club or community and start to revolve their lives around doing things that will get acolades by the community, whether it is a fishing club and you make sure you make it out every morning before work to try to catch a great fish so that you can tell your community how well you did, receiving acolades and being a "big fish" within that community for your efforts. Or any number of groups where following their process makes you more welcome among the members.

As for whether or not it is an addiction, I read one article that made sense. It said that many alcoholics started drinking when they were a teenager. When you drink alcohol your body treats it like a poison, your body reacts, you may get sick if you have too much, you get hung over as your body has literally been poisoned. If you do this once in a while this is no big deal, but as a teenager who's body is developing, if you repeatedly drink alcohol your body will accept that for some reason you will continue to drink this poison so your developing body changes to accept alcohol not as a poison but as something that your body will tolerate and even need. You will feel good when you drink alcohol and your body will crave it when you do not have it in your system. This is what alcoholics have to live with. People who do not have this type of body chemistry look at alcoholics as weak because they can have a couple of drinks and stop with no problem. An alcoholic has two drinks and his body has taken over and needs more and more and more, the euphoria has taken over.

I have been to a few of these AA meetings with a friend and I am saddened that the meetings are not about taking control of your own body and your life but rather replacing one addiction with another. Every AA meeting will have people drowning themselves in coffee or there are the smoker's meetings where everyone is puffing away at cigarettes as they talk about how they are glad that they have their alcohol addiction under control.

I do not know what the solution is, you have changed your body's chemistry while it was developing. I doubt as an adult you can do much to change it back. Your body is pretty much done developing.

The best thing that can be done is to discourage kids who's bodies are still developing from drinking alcohol. Let them know that they are not just damaging their bodies in the short term but they are choosing a miserable life of being addicted to something that will control them the rest of their lives.

There is money to be made in research that shows that there is global warming.

I know from experience that when doing studies for the government, the first question that comes up at the meeting before the study is done is "what answer do they want?". I did simulation coding for military radio technology. They would usually come to us to see if a particular configuration of radios would have a bottle neck or if there would be coverage during a battle. With radio technology there are so many factors to simulate that you can tweak a few numbers and get very different results. Both legitimate based upon the limited ability to model every single aspect of the situation. So we tend to follow the trail that leads toward the result the customer is expecting, or as close to it as possible with plenty of data to back it up.

You know how in math class you would sometimes have the answers in the back of the book but you still had to show your work. And how you would do the math question keeping the answer in mind as you go through it. That is how such research is done.

If I were an environmentalist and my data showed cooling, I would go back and refine the data in a completely legitimate way until the results showed warming. Both answers would be right. Based upon the limited abstraction of the simulated data. You cannot simulate every molecule in the world, so you have to summarize large amounts of molecules in an explainable way.

The key is, what answer would get me the next contract or grant.

lol

That sucks, I used them whenever I could for my online purchases.

I wonder if there could be a good p2p way of doing this where you submit your product that you want to purchase and several people bid to fulfill the order for you using their own credit card.

I have no idea what thinkprogress.org's agenda is.

Ok, I am looking at the chart.

Is it two separate religions or just one? Why did they stop calling it global warming and now refer to it as climate change? Will climate change combine the two religions?

You know what else is just around the corner?





+2 internets points for including a cat picture.

I thought global cooling was the new thing. Are people still on the global warming fad?

This is so confusing. Will we become less violent when the world cools down as the new fad suggests?

Espiratasu itar olipartini.

 

Not if 1 Bitcoin is worth $1 Quadrillion.

It has been stated several times that more decimal places can be added easily.

Whatever your political point of view, whether we need this or that, whether the government should do something about whatever or not. Whether we should be involved in whichever thing or ignore it. It does not matter. All that matters is power.

We are fooling ourselves if we believe that anything can be changed in Washington that would give power back to the people, or if that power would remain. An anarchist/libertarian society? Forget it. A communist utopia? Only if people are slaves to the masters with power.

When it comes down to it, we live in an anarchist, survival of the fittest world. But when people think of such a world they think of preppers with guns killing weaker people for their supplies and surviving because they have more guns or are stronger or whichever.

But the reality is that all things equal, two people are more powerful than one. So the two people have more power than that one person and can pretty much tell that one person how they should live. Unless that one person finds two other people so that it is three against two. Then they can determine what everyone should do. And on and on, the groups getting bigger, the power growing within each group. 1000 people against 500 people, the 1000 people get to decide how society works. All the way to millions of people with a huge military and nuclear weapons. How could you possibly think you can get the power back to that one person?

But the thing about that is that those large groups of people join forces to protect themselves from other groups, but within the group there are groups of people with more power than the rest. So even if you do not agree with what those with more power in your group want to do, your only other option is no protection.

Was our country founded on ideas alone? Or did they have more power than the British? The huge amount of effort it required for the British to send ships to America and fight a far off war caused their ideas to become the losing ideas. Not the merit of the politics, but the fact that we won the war. We displayed our power. Is democracy the best way to run a government? Is that why all of these countries are becoming democratic? Or does it have something to do with the most power country in the world flexing its muscles and pushing it on nations?

In a way, libertarians in the US are fighting a far more difficult battle than if they were in some small country with a tiny military force.

Your political ideology will only work if it includes a more powerful force than the current one in place. Giving power back to the people is great, as long as your political system has a way for them to all join that power together to fight a larger force. And that means, at this stage in human technological advances, being more powerful than a full on nuclear strike. And if your political ideology can do that, you need to make sure someone cannot control all of that power to take control of those that combined their power.

Of course, power is not just guns and bullets. It includes money. And I believe Bitcoins can help in that piece of the puzzle.

1 Bitcoin could be the full monetary system for an entire country.

"He ran him out of the store with a bar stool. He was asked if he could identify the guy and he said 'yeah, that's George.' He knew him right away,"



That is awesome.

When the government is ready to attack Iran, CNN will tell you how evil the leader of Iran is and how you may die at any moment if he is not taken care of.

There was once a "daylight tax" in Britain:


http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/rise_parliament/docs/window_tax.htm


I know several local taxes include a rain tax.

Ok...attempted character assassination...


http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/07/mail-from-the-velvet-cybercrime-underground/

Crowdfunding such is no different than an individual paying for something like that.

Someone still needs to execute it.

Though you are onto a form of tipping the balance of power.

An anonymous version of my signature would...do things.

Is Iran invasion still "just around the corner"?

How does it feel to live in fear? That's what it's like to be a slave.

So the first Bitcoin game that uses Bitcoin is finally getting started.

http://www.bitfantasy.com

It is a sort of strategy RPG game played on your browser.

It costs BTC to start playing but from there on it costs nothing. But you can trade in-game objects for bitcoins.

Everything in the game costs gold pieces and the shops in the game only deal in gold but the player to player market is all bitcoin based and it appears that the developers are trying to push more player to player purchases as opposed to buying things from the shops. Though it is currently in Beta so there are only a few people on there testing things out.

I have been Beta testing it and it is pretty fun. It has all of the typical quest type of stuff where you can go around fighting monsters and getting goodies and experience and all of that, but they also have the ability to build farms and homes and your own Inn with the ability to make money from farming the farms and having people pay to use your Inn.

I like that it is almost like a multi-player strategy game, with a bit of hack and slash thrown in. There is a good team at work making it better and I can see it growing very well once they open up for players.

Let me know if you want to get in on helping with the Beta phase before they open it up to the public.