CapitalistImperialistPig

There is every reason to believe that for the first couple of hundred thousand years of human existence all people lived in mobile hunter-gatherer bands.  There is considerable evidence that all, or nearly all, such bands encountered in historic times practiced some sort of redistribution, usually by sharing large kills.  There is indirect but persuasive evidence that this practice is of great antiquity (large kills show evidence of being butchered by a single individual).  This kind of sharing produced highly egalitarian societies. When people settled down, either because of concentrated local food resources or agriculture, this changed.  Societies became stratified and unequal.  Nobles, princes and social classes rapidly become entrenched.  The transformation seems to have been triggered by the invention of property.  In a mobile HG band, property is what you can carry, and nobody has enough to be jealous of, or if you are jealous of it, you probab...

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice..................Robert Frost Fortunately for the humans of Oz, most of the victims were horses, camels, bats, and fish. The (human) citizens of Phoenix, Arizona are also doing poorly: More than 155 people died from heat-related causes in the Phoenix area last year, a new record in a place where the number of such deaths has been on the rise. Former Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton deemed it a public health crisis, and the city has launched an overhaul of how it prepares for and deals with extreme heat. ... Already,  more people die  from heat-related causes in the U.S. than from all other extreme weather events. And as with other disasters, the most vulnerable are the elderly, the sick and the poor.

Yet more evidence that humans are too stupid to survive comes from this news story of two police officers playing Russian Roulette. According to the story: Alix was off duty at the time of the shooting, police said. Hendren and his partner were on duty. All three were in Hendren's apartment shortly before 1 a.m. Hendren took all the bullets out of a revolver and then put one back in, police said in a probable cause statement. He spun the cylinder, pointed it away and pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire. Alix then took the gun, pointed it at Hendren and pulled the trigger without discharging a bullet, police said. Hendren’s partner told Hendren and Alix “that they shouldn’t be playing with guns and that they were police officers,” police said in the statement. “He felt uncomfortable with them playing with guns and didn’t want to have any part of it and started to leave." Hendren took the gun back and pulled the trigger. “As [Hendren's partner] left the roo...

Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax on the super wealthy (more than $50 million, 2% tax) and ultra wealthy (more than $1 billion, 3% tax), though there is some chance that such taxes may be unconstitutional. I like the goal - reducing inequality while delivering important services like health care and education - but have some qualms about the methodology. A big tax on, say, Jeff Bezos's wealth would quickly dilute his control of Amazon, and detaching a company from its guiding force might be counterproductive. On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem with taxing the hell out of luxuries like private jets, yachts, football teams, and residential property worth more than, say, ten times the US median home price.

If we are to take GRE scores as indicative, philosophy attracts some of the best and brightest graduate students. They top the scores in verbal ability and analytical writing. They aren't even especially low in mathematical scoring. Why so? It's probably not the big bucks. As one of the standard jokes goes "What's the difference between a philosophy grad and a large pepperoni pizza?" "The pizza can feed a family of four." There is, I suppose, the hope that philosophy will let you understand the world and your fellow humans. Unfortunately, it's really not very good at either. I recently took a class in ancient philosophy, and it drove me nuts. Why so? In science, when an idea is overcome by facts, we throw it out. Philosophy doesn't seem to operate that way. Thales thought everything was made of water. Not a bad guess, given the info available at the time, but wrong, wrong, wrong. Consign the idea to the dustbin of history - of mer...

The Sun has a mass slightly less than 2 e+30 kg, and radiates a bit less than 4 e+26 Watts (Joules/sec). That amounts to about 2/10,000 of a Watt per kilogram. For comparison, a 60 kg human (132 lbs) produces about 100 Watts. On a Watt per kilogram basis, a human is thus producing about 10000 times as much heat as the Sun. So why is the Sun so much hotter and brighter that you are? One way of looking at it is that the Sun has far less surface area per kilogram than you do - something like a billion times less, so the amount of heat leaving it per unit area is about 100,000 times more. Another thing to think about is the reaction rate. Conversion of Hydrogen to Helium is quite slow in the Sun - an average Hydrogen nucleus (proton) may bump around for ten billion years or so before it (and three friends) get converted to Helium. A molecule of ATP in a human cell only lasts a couple of seconds.

There is a tiny bit of satisfaction to realize that we aren't the only country run by idiots. Right now, though, the toughest competition seems to be coming from our long time ally and former colonial master, the no longer so very United Kingdom. Brexit is turning out to be a disaster, surprising absolutely no one with a positive IQ. Although I don't know of any evidence that the British leadership is in the pocket of a hostile foreign power, it does seem that the two chief political parties are both dedicated to the same stupid idea. It looks like the Brits are coming face to face with a serious "now what?" moment.