"Natural Selection will destroy us" interesting article

[SilverbladeTE]

http://www.newscientist.com/article...belist-natural-selection-will-destroy-us.html

not only as a general interest, but in regards as to how/why scumbags are covering up and abusing the ME/CFS issue (as general greed/selfish short term stupidity thing)

Biology Nobelist: Natural selection will destroy us
28 February 2011 by Clint Witchalls
Magazine issue 2801. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Interviews Topic Guide
We have evolved traits that will lead to humanity's extinction, says Christian de Duve so we must learn to overcome them

We are the most successful species on the planet, but you think we will ultimately pay the price for this success. Why?

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

You think that natural selection has worked against us. How?

Because it has no foresight. Natural selection has resulted in traits such as group selfishness being coded in our genes. These were useful to our ancestors under the conditions in which they lived, but have become noxious to us today. What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future. Natural selection doesn't do that; it looks only at what is happening today. It doesn't care about your grandchildren or grandchildren's grandchildren.

You call this short-sightedness "original sin". Why did you pick this terminology?

I believe that the writers of Genesis had detected the inherent selfishness in human nature that I propose is in our genes, and invented the myth of original sin to account for it. It's an image. I am not acting as an exegete - I don't interpret scripture.

How can humanity overcome this "original sin"?

We must act against natural selection and actively oppose some of our key genetic traits.

One solution you propose is population control, but isn't this ethically dubious?

It is a simple matter of figures. If you want this planet to continue being habitable for everyone that lives here, you have to limit the number of inhabitants. Hunters do it by killing off the old or sick animals in a herd, but I don't think that's a very ethical way of limiting the population. So what remains? Birth control. We have access to practical, ethical and scientifically established methods of birth control. So I think that is the most ethical way to reduce our population.

You also advocate giving more power to women. Why?

Speaking as a biologist, I think women are less aggressive than men, and they play a larger role in the early education of the young and helping them overcome their genetic heirloom.

Are you optimistic about humankind's future?

I'm cautiously optimistic - very cautiously. I try to be optimistic because I prefer to give a message of hope to young people, to say: you can do something about it. But in the present, there is not much evidence that this is happening.

 

[Crappy]

Sounds like you made the leap from Idealist to Cynic like me and Mr Carlin.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLEtb9N9oMA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLSWD6OLEs0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDcqlmF0OR4&feature=related

 

[rwac]

What a pile of crap. Malthusians have repeatedly predicted us running out of resources for a very long time.
It turns out that wealthy people naturally reduce fertility upto the point where it is actually below replacement level, less than 2 children on average. See Japan and Europe.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Crappy
lol, Carlin was AWESOME!

hm what was the quote (not by Carlin) something like "Inside every cynic their is a frustrated romantic"
Very true I think, we get cynical because we care.

RWAC
oh good grief....we ARE running out of resources, wha yu think the Earth magiclaly manufactures them?
they are finite!
Most wars are about resource theft, hard put to think of one off hand that was NOT about that.

Afghanistan.oh we suddnely find there's vast reserves of lithium and other useful minerals there, and we just havne't noticed them on our spy satellites for 3 decades!? oh yeha give me a break!

Rare earths,s ee HUGE issue about that.

Water..not long to major wars occur over water, see Isreal and Jordan trying to work out a plan to pump sea water form Red Sea to Dead sea, as the the Dead Sea is drying up at an insane rate as the River Jordan's basiclaly reduced to a trickle by users up stream.

We're probably already PAST "Peak oil", wait till gas hits $100/gallon...then it will be NUKES AKIMBO!

We're going through resources at a rate it would take about THREE planet Earth's to replace.

Soil quality across the Western world has dropped by up to 40%, because of gross over useage and overuseage of chemicals. It requires far more care, hedgerows/small woods and humus to create good soils, instead the fields are turning to clay.

Scientific advancements cannot overcome practical limitations, the biggest of all them is Human stupidity and greed!
We have a TINy fraction of Humanity owning the vast majority of the resources...and squandering them.

Sperm counts have fallen liek a rock in Western world: can evolutionary changes account for that, or is it becuse we're being poisoned by our toxins?

Vast increase in rate of children born with sexual malformation or intersexed. This is also mirrored to extent by other animals showing sexual changes way beyond the norms. Linked ot what's cauisng sperm count reductions?

As said elsewhere, where I live is a toxic hellhole. They buitl a huge steelmaking complex right BESIDE the town, no seperation at all. For deacdes it pumped heavy metals and other crap over the entire region. it cost over 100 million to clean the site up but NOTHING was done for the surroudning town or people, and cancer/health issues are sky high here. Freakin artifical hill holds 680,000 tons of heavy metal polluted earth there!
You can repeat that thousands of times across the world, for steel, ore and sinter plants, wood treatment plants that used mercury, then you cna check on rivers polluted with mercury by idiot goldminers, etc etc.
Note that heavy metal pollution is essentially "eternal" or at least until the next Ice Age scrapes it away or such incredibly long periods of a very wet climate flushes them into the sea.

We are now living in a new geologicla age! we move so much damn earth and rock, we are literally changing the face of the planet so we're soon to be in an officially new geologicla age, the Anthropocene. We move more earth and rock than all the world's rivers combined.

We're also living in a Mass Extinction Event, caused by us!!

If you wish to debate I can provide facts to support all that, alas and to our eternal shame :/

I'm not some damn idiot who wants to hark back to some imaginery "Golden Age" that never existed, hell, the Romans were advanced cause they had sponges to wipe their backsides with!
But we ARE destorying our chances for species survial. Holy sh*t what other species has 10,000 bloody thermonuclear warheads, eh?! thats hard proof of our social insanity.

 

[rwac]

Resources are finite, but people are generally capable of thinking up alternate ways of doing most things.

For instance there was a great fear of NYC being buried in horse manure at the end of the 19th century, never happened.

I don't believe we are at peak oil yet.
Drilling for Oil/Coal/Natural gas is banned in large segments of the US by federal law, this is Political Peak Oil. It is also in Arab countries' interest to promote "Peak Oil" because they benefit from higher crude prices.
See here for instance: http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFN3029057520101130

As for human sperm counts, It is caused by the changes in diet over the last 70 years or so, testosterone levels are also dropping.
Consumption of Animal fat has reduced drastically and sugar and carbs have replaced it. This can firmly be blamed on the USDA promoted diet.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

RWAC
and the eventual replacement of the horse...was the car

not only has the motor car been a major factor in the Global Warming (which is gonna trigger WW3 by end of this century, over further strained resources from it's effects), but in your probable lifetime, 2.4 MILLION Americans will have been torn to pieces on the roads, did you know that? Go extrapolate the death toll figures.
It's the same as if the Russians or some nutcase terrorist detonated a multi-megaton "city buster" bomb in a major USA city. All for the sake of "convenient personal transport", selfish bloody murder IMHO :/

hey large open areas need such vehicles I can agree, but otherwise, no, no need for the high performance weapons of death and mayhem many drivers ain't mentally fit to operate, in urban areas that should have kept and expanded tram networks, instead of scrapping them to boost automobile sales, as they in fact did here in the UK
And I am aware death tolls are higher on country roads...because of poorer maintenance and design and freakin' idiots thinking cruising at 70mph up a little back road is "fun"...until they tear some poor sod in half

And that's just ONE "answer" to such a "problem" we ape-idiots came up with! jeesh, lol!
Or rather, great creation, but bloody stupid implementation


so how do you explain the fact that sperm counts have fallen across the *WESTERN* world then, not merely the USA? and how does that cause such severe sexual malformation 'cause it's the women, not men, who carry the foetuses?
Sorry evidence shows you are wrong, it's the chemicals we've put in our water supply that's doing that (or often, the breakdown products of such), we know that from sexually malformed/gender reversal in fish and other animals, see tests supporting this theory.
Your idea may have merit, but evidence storngly supports oestrogen-like chemicals in water doing this.

Question: can you see that consumerism is a form of addiction?

 

[rwac]

Yes, the whole point is that the car replaced the horse solving some problems but bringing new problems. And the car will eventually be replaced in turn.

You neglect to mention the people saved by emergency services. But people want their cars despite the accident rate. They are willing to accept the risk that comes with it.

I don't know that much about the UK, but were they scrapped because they were unprofitable or because of automobile sales ? I'm inclined to believe the former.

Sadly, most of the western world has chosen to follow the US dietary guidelines. For instance the Eatwell Plate in the UK is very similar to the US Food Pyramid.
Although the consequences of bad nutrition is more visible in men, women are affected too. Infertility is also a big problem in the Western world.

I'm not saying oestrogen like substances are negligible, just that diet is a big part of the problem.

It's probably an addiction for some people, but I imagine a lot more people benefit from the choices available due to consumerism.

 

[guest]

What a pile of crap. Malthusians have repeatedly predicted us running out of resources for a very long time.
It turns out that wealthy people naturally reduce fertility upto the point where it is actually below replacement level, less than 2 children on average. See Japan and Europe.

I completely agree. Mankind evolves. Nuclear fusion could be the solution to all our energy problems with a nearly infinite supply of the required deuterium.

 

[caledonia]

If you're interested in alternative energy, there is a PBS Nova show in April that's going to show some new technologies. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/power-surge.html

This one from February had two interesting technologies starting the 46 minute mark I had never heard of - a Bloom Box and artificial photosynthesis. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/power-surge.html It sounds like those two could work hand in hand to create hydrogen from the sun and water and convert that into electricity - the ultimate fuel cell.

If you have read Sherry Roger's book Tired or Toxic, she mentions the sexual problems in animals resulting from estrogen mimicking chemicals. Specifically, the loss of male alligators. If it's happening in animals, you know it's probably happening in humans too.

I don't believe this would come from a change in diet, however, it could come from a change in food packaging, such as the plastics used to package food. When I grew up food was stored in tin cans, cardboard, waxed paper, glass, etc. Now it's mainly plastic or materials coated with plastic.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Alas we still cannot make fusion work bar in very limited ways, nor are likely to for decades (short of some great break through). There's still no good way or even many attempts, to get power OUT of test fusion systems which is the whole point.
If we could stop being morons waging wars etc, and pool efforts to get to the Moon, we could mine Helium-3 for fusion. Russians concluded doing that would be easier than building the Trans-Siberian Pipeline, fyi.

Thorum fission reactors offer a method to avoid high level waste and nuclear weapon issues...still haven't got it working though in practice.
And don't even go near using Strontium-90 and other such isotopes for thermal reactors *shudder*, they do work very well, danger though is extreme as Russian screw ups showed.
Uranium mining and extraciton is incredibly dirty and leaves horrendous environemental and Human damage..and see Depleted Uranium as another horror.
Go see Uranium Hexaflouride for a practical defintion of "horrific"! :/
Uranium is limited resource, thorium is far more widely avaliable. To extend use of uranium you need breeder reactors so you get plutonium and all the crap THAT brings. See Sellafield.

More than renenawable energies per se (as in massive civil engineering projects), MICRO-generation is the real key, but Big Business simply will not allow it, and through it's stooges in government has for decades has stymied such
letting users generate their own power, and thus utilize much wasted roof/land space, reduce loss from resistance, etc, would be a great step forward.

Hyper capacitors, not fuel cells, hold the real key to mobile energy as they are tough, don't wear out, don't contian dangerous chemicals nor are volatile, and any rare materials used last for many decades
where as fuel cells require
rare catalysts (like palladium, these are strategic mineral resources = war flash point issues)
OR
carbon60 nanotubes (see research) which are potentially a huge health hazard (needs lot of research, last thing we need is somehting as toxic as nerve gas, as in amount required to cause eventual death not speed, with the effects of asbestos)

etc etc
Every answer brings more problems. You cannot evade that fact. And some of the problems we are causing are catastrophic in conjunction!
GLobal Warming + sexual disfinction/sterility from chlorinates mimicking oestrogen + land clearance for financial farming (it's not for food it's for cash) + massive build up of hyper toxic/radioactive long lifes (Sellafield has 100 tons of Plutonium on site, jebuz!!) +over use of artifial fertilizers/pesticides (polluting rivers and causing oceanic anoxia amonsgt other things) etc etc = eventual collapse of our civilization, don't kid yourself.

We're in a an out-of-control bobsleigh ride with an avalanche we started at our arses and a precipice in front of us. We either figure out how to fly over the precipice, or some other unusual thing, or we get splattered by the avalanche we set off, or by killing each other off:
total NBC war because when it gets to food/water, absolute genocide will be the order of the day as either your group survives or perishes, so must wipe out the "other", it will be that brutal
Think I'm kidding? If folk will start wars over oil, diamonds, even commercial fishing, they sure as hell will war over food/water

Science dos NOT run the world. You cannot make inventions/discoveries to order. crisis have brought such to the fore, but they are not "magical", to expect it to always rush to the rescue is absurd and naive.
We've got plenty of tools ot make a better world if we really tried and I'll tell you one of the simplest, and one that will NEVER come to pass because of Mankind's insane greed:
Let no person earn more than 4 times that of the basic wage, wages should reflect danger, risk, degredation and societal need not just privilege and make the basic wage actually decent for it's meant to be the basis for your society, not for slaves!
There, you wipe out huge source of inequality and the accumulation of wealth that always tears societies, and thus common sense, apart. Leading to the recent banking crisis for example, or the lust for welath that was the real basis behind WW1 and WW2's carnage (and historical facts show those were resource wars, too)
If a Greek philosopher can figure that out 2500+ years ago, why can't we?

Simple explanation: without farmers we *ALL DIE*, no society, end of civilization, so why aren't they the ones earning millions, hm? Why not the fireman who saves your kids lives at great risk to his own? The front line infantryman?
Why does sitting at a desk indoors, in comfort mean you are automatically entitled to a vastly higher share of society's wealth than the one who builds your home with hard labour and maybe bad weather, the woman cleans your stinking toilets or the crew who unblocks your sewers after every storm by hand and stops you dying of cholera?
hard work and skill deserve reward, but not in the insane ratios we have now, for example, head of Exxon retired few years ago with a $400 million package..that is insane.

Mankind evolves very very slowly, well, faster than was thought but it's still glacially slow compared ot our *technological* advancement and societal change...there's a dichotomy there you should be very wary of. Old "faustian pact", "Morlocks and Elois" stuff.
Our limbic system still rules us, greed, fear, hunger etc, primitives with hydrogen bombs...bad mixture!

I'm not a "Luddite nitwit", I'm a "Luddite who doesn't trust Big Business and Government or frankly, people in groups, because history proves they behave stupidly!"

 

[rwac]

Let no person earn more than 4 times that of the basic wage, ages should reflect danger, risk, degredation and societal need not just privilege and make the basic wage actually decent for it's meant to be the basis for your society, not for slaves!

This level of micromanagement will destroy us. Do you realize how many years of school a surgeon has to go through ?
And you think that someone would bother to become a surgeon if people were paid no more than 4x minimum wage ?
What about Engineers who also go through a fair bit of school ?

You're a socialist luddite who wants Government to give you everything you want.

 

[rwac]

If you have read Sherry Roger's book Tired or Toxic, she mentions the sexual problems in animals resulting from estrogen mimicking chemicals. Specifically, the loss of male alligators. If it's happening in animals, you know it's probably happening in humans too.

I don't believe this would come from a change in diet, however, it could come from a change in food packaging, such as the plastics used to package food.

The fact remains, the western diet has changed significantly over the last hundred years. Over the same hundred years, the occurance of heart attacks, diabetes have increased significantly. I imagine that there was a fair bit of pollution in the early 20th century before the EPA came into existence.

Mammals in general have very good detox capability compared to reptiles such as alligators. Also note that reptiles live in the water and are constantly exposed to these estrogen-like chemicals.

The Coronary Heart Disease Epidemic
The Coronary Heart Disease Epidemic: Possible Culprits Part I
The Coronary Heart Disease Epidemic: Possible Culprits Part II

 

[SilverbladeTE]

This level of micromanagement will destroy us. Do you realize how many years of school a surgeon has to go through ?
And you think that someone would bother to become a surgeon if people were paid no more than 4x minimum wage ?
What about Engineers who also go through a fair bit of school ?

You're a socialist luddite who wants Government to give you everything you want.

1) Argue the points, don't attack the person, especially by attacking and evading the points they brought up, you dont' show any wish to debate, k? You are actually proving the initial point of this thread when you do that.
What you think I'm a Karl Marx groupie? Some rich kid nitwit who thinks Che Gueverra was "da biz"? think again please, quite happy to debate such with ya
I gave you lots of interesting bits n' bobs about research and limitations to talk about but you pick one thing to attack over and ignroe the rest...

"you just want the government to give you everything" when for your edification, the tax cuts Bush Jr MKII's Adminsitration brought in for the richest section of taxpayers, cost the US treasury $3.3 TRILLION dollars in lost revenue over his terms in office, and made the mega-rich, mega-richer...meanwhile running TWO wars which should require raising taxation to pay for the damn things.
so who's really getting everything off the government, sir or madam? Be honest, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, fact of life, except when the poor get support and fair wages.
ordinary folks are the bse of the "pyramid" society is based on, you undermine that base, to increase it's "heights", at your peril, just like a real pyramid, bad design causes collapse in the end.

2) Didn't I say reward skill and effort and raise the minimum wage to what's a real LIVING wage for REAL people? thus, skilled people would get x3 or x4 basic wage, and basic wage itself would be around 15+/hour (the x4 is a maximum based on what folk will tolerate in differences before umbrage and anger set in)
in high expense areas like certain cities the minumum wage would have to be higher, see real issues London has had with not having enough "essential service personel" because ordinary people could not afford to live there.

In a *sane* world, education would be free at all levels, it is the best investmrnt any civilization can make after civil engineering and security. The returns doctors, researchers, engineers etc give back to a society vastly outweight the costs of higher education. Likewise, folk with access to higher education have grealty reduced burdens of criminality, antisocial behaviour and health problems.
Don't argue otherwise without good evidence please, I live in an ex-industrial area destroyed in the 1980s by lunatic ultra-Capitalist practices gone mad, and seen the results, hell, I've been one of the casualties (anything taken to extremes is bad, be it politics, economics, religion or whatever)

Sorry to break it to you but the "minium wage" is not livable, hence the use of illegal immigrants and other bad practices....again bringing us back to initial point of this thread.

the banking crisis nealry destroyed Western civilization, it was seconds away from completely collapsing the stock market...suggest you go read up on that, basically they had to pull the plug on it all, something they've worked hard to keep "sotto". but the evidence is there.Richard Preston on the BBC did good work on such.

Those responsible ended up coming out RICHER in the end...for an act which has caused vastly more damage and cost more lives than all the terrorist atrocities of the last century :/
None of them behaved rationally, they were driven by blind, short-term greed and hormones: the limbic system rules all the more strongly the more sociopathic you are.
Altruism is damn hard for most folk, even though it's the superior strategy (see genetics etc which is showing altrusim in both moral and survival sense of genes, is the better method to being psychopathic)

I'm sure you may point out that even if say, doctors, engineers etc were paid x3 or x4 this improved basic wage, they iitll may not be able to afford their mortgages, fair point.
well, simple fact is mortgage costs (and thus house and rent prices) became a huge millstone aorund our collective necks. It was a wonderful way for the banks to bleed people dry, it caused immense damage to society, with many families having both partners working far more hours than was good for them or their children to meet these ludicrous costs

basic rule of thumb is a mortgage suitable for your means should only be x5 the yearly wage. Fact is, in England, house prices, including average house prices for your average family, became x10 the average wage, leading to horrendous debt and the ensuing mess we've seen.
The bankers knew this, they were warned, they didn't care, they sacked those who said this was dangerous.
Proof again of the original topic of this thread.

Interesting you bring up the EPA, you do know how that started? and the attempts by many to destroy or weaken it? not very sensible if we were ruled by reason and altruism, which we patently are not.

yes amphibians/fish are exposed more to such, but remember a typical glass of water in London has gone through a Human kidney 15 times...(recycled water as the reigon has far too many Humans for it's available water table to support with a huge amount of effort) Obviously that will concentrate more toxins.

As for diabetes, at least for Type 1, evidence now supports enteroviruses being the main culprit..enteroviruses..interesting eh? considering possible link to what we suffer (polio or polio vaccines being possible strong link at least in early outbreaks of ME)
http://professional.diabetes.org/News_Display.aspx?TYP=9&CID=83480

And then for type 2, also increased evidence of exposure to plastic break down products which accumulate in fat cells.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bpa-study-plastic-chemica
so, we have both more sugars etc as you note causing increased obesity (which can store these poisons)...more use of cars reducing typical fitness...and many plastic and other products buidling up toxins in our bodies...bad mixture!

 

[rwac]

It's not meant to be name calling. I was just elaborating on your declaration of being a Luddite.
Besides when did socialist become a swear word, it's seems to be a good description for someone who wants to cap max wages.

The problem with a higher min. wage is that the min. wage is not meant to be a liveable wage. It's meant to be given to someone who you're taking a risk by hiring.
A minimum wage actually makes it harder to get very low end jobs.
Was it "Ultra-Capitalism" that destroyed your area or was it excessive regulation which made it cheaper or simpler to build things elsewhere ?
I don't know about Glasgow, but the Unions killed Detroit.

My point about the EPA is that pollution has actually decreased over the last century, but yet people have become sicker.

Free higher education is another problem. It means an oversupply of people with degrees, and people with Masters degrees will end up waiting tables.

Yup, the real estate bubble is crashing at this very moment. It is also unfortunate that the culprits of the banking crisis got away scot free.

As for vaccinations, the problem is that The Government has decided that they are Safe, without the evidence.

Yes, there are a lot of problems, but I believe none of them are unsurmountable, and the damage we do to ourselves with disinformation *should* be the easiest to fix. And the worst of the disinformation comes from the government, because most people believe that they are unbiased ...

 

[Crappy]

the banking crisis nealry destroyed Western civilization

It's not over yet.

Arabs or Chinese may be able to just walk onto the continent because the people will be arguing over scraps of meat, and water to drink.

All that cash Wall Street Con Men have stuffed in their mattresses won't be worth didly when the currency collapses. Seems like finance people could get that part.

for nothin' you financial midgets!

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Rwac
oops, sorry!
lol out there in LaLa-land, my suggestion is "evil heresy! Buuuurn the commie!" lol
will give longer reply tomorrow, knakcered, watching Sky At Night etc soon, too

 

[SilverbladeTE]

RWAC
ok various points

when the unions were strong (but nto being blockheads), things were much better in both US and UK, by boosting basic wages, they helped folk drag themselves out of poverty
this was NOT handed ot them by the plutocrats
Unions are constantly used as an excuse, a boogeyman.

Now in Uk there was a problem with unions when they got too politicized and union officers got arrogant and thought they were little tin pot dictators, lol but they weren't the majority, it wasn't in every workplace and the UK's class culture and completely out of touch management structures were even more at fualt.

What screwed UK was terrible stupidity on both sides: ordinary workers had 150 years of resentment built up for being treated liek dirt, management had little common ground with workers and very little practical experience (being the boss's son or some non-applicable degree doens't mean you know jack sh*t!), and nationalized industries had terrible bureacratic or rivalry issues.

yes, things needed ot change in 1980s, that I can agree on with a truly *conservative* viewpoint, as opposed to fascist, problem was, what we got was "slash and burn", the Tory government hated the unions and Working Class, wnated them broken, wanted UK to become Middle Class Tory voters...strategic industries and utiliies were sold off ot make the rich, richer.

Example: we now buy much of our ammunition for our military form abroad because they sold off our military's industrial arm...that is *RETARDED* beyond belief :/ Saving money doesn't matter a damn if we end up not able to supply ourselves in some crisis, jeesh that was lesson we learned the hard way in two world wars! :/


Now, here's a great guy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Reid
they took over a shipyard, and kept working, they wanted to WORK, not strike.

And the beautiful irony was...closing the CLyde shipyards bit the big companies back in the ass.
Lloyd's the ship insurer, noted the older over-engineered Clyde built ships with national crew under their national flag, lasted a hell of a lot better than the cheap ships flying under flags of convenience with a mishmash of poorly paid folk and complianed about repeatedly about this c
an also see this flowing in to the current sea piracy issues, ships prior to late 1950s/early 60s were routinely armed, they SHOT pirates, and British navy had a policy of hunting down and wiping out pirates.

My dad's factory built clocks..they still had machinery form WW2 and before, ie innefficient. the company was offered quartz technology first, but turned it down thinking it ws new fangled stuff that wouldn't catch on...wrong! that and other cretinous mismanagement drive the company into the ground.
To cap it all the management robbed the pension fund, so my dad who'd paid in for 31 years was left with only 36 a month of his pension and the execs got to play golf abroad in their retirement.

When the factory was demolished, my dad walked by it (walking the dog), he saw the walls/rubble were GLOWING. it was radioactive as hell from radium/phosphorous used to make the dials luminous, had ot get the International Atomic Energy Agency in to help clean it up, and it was right beside a housing scheme and a primary school.
Not surprisingly not many folk who had worked in the radiation section lived very long.

A huge part of wage costs in America are the health insurance premiums, about 1/3rd iirc in places, that is...insane. that's what's costing a lot of US jobs (and again, greed by shipping jobs abroad etc)
Over here a company does not have to pay such, it comes out of various taxation and as has been shown, the US pays about twice whatever everyone else does for about half of the actual effectiveness in health care.
It's insane that the USA has some of th ebest hospitals and medical staff...but the vast majority cannot afford their services. Hence US death/infant mortality etc rates are so out of whack.

pollution *inside people*, and epigenetic damage, has increased over the century
see, the problems this:
many poisons last a long time in soil, water or in people, heavy metals being the worst for longevity as they are elemental
Toxicity of our creations has increased. Arsenic, tanning run off, fine lung damaging dust form coal and metal working are all bad...but, as tech increased, it became PCBs...organosphosphates...those are incredibly toxic and we've been ingesting more complex and nastier crap in our food. organochlorines were replaced by organophosphates.

Epigenetics = stress/poison damage done to your great grandad can affect his offprsing, damage done to his son can affect his offspring...it's a cumulative nightmare.
So, herd folk up into tight communities where disease runs rampant (1800s) then start producing nastier and nastier chemicals ever after, then stressing hell out of them in multiple ways...and we wonder why we have ill health?! ack!

ALso, another issue on health issues is statistics: lot of folk plain died off in previous times and so, we think there weren't as many sick folk when in fact they had died, or been "disposed of" by society by illegal, secretive Eugenics or compassionate doctors who had no means to treat them and had the choice between morphia overdose or letting a patient die in agony or squalor.
Also, huge sanatoriums were full of folk who were kept out of sight etc.
Please see Eugenics in USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics#United_States and other countries too.
Hey, beyond say parish help, if you were poor, you were *screwed* in them days.

Free higher education is not a problem, the USA is being out done by the Chinese, to compete it needs a huge load of fresh, eager, educated minds, or it will become a "has been", or worse. No Empire lasts forever, best to use it's riches to improve it's people, as people are the true wealth of any nation.
also as said, even if they do end up being waiters..there's less chance of them committing crime, crime is a huge millstone round the neck of society. USA has 1 million citizens in jail, that is a very serious problem.

Much as I like (Western) socialism based on justice and compassion...I know it, and ANY form of governance or system is inevitably screwed by the fact us Humans are idiots in groups
Sorry if I'm bitter, just...lot of bad stuff, plus ME effects and us being screwed over doesn't help, lol!

anyway something very important to watch on these issues, maths proves HUmans are fubared!
[video=youtube;F-QA2rkpBSY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY[/video]

 

[rwac]

Again, I'm not going to comment on the situation in the UK, or even in the past.
The present problem is that union labour in the auto manufacturing sector is much more expensive than non-union labor in the US.
Union workers get really good health insurance and a really good pension, atleast in theory. This made the US automakers inefficient vs Honda and Toyota, and led to management making bad decisions and cutting corners on quality. And the pension funds ? They're managed by the union and there's not enough money in them.
The current situation is that unions have become a millstone around the neck of GM and Chrysler.

Again, you're suggesting that we're basically beyond help. This is not true. There are a lot of anecdotal stories of people being helped by adopting a paleo diet.
Only time will tell what part of the damage is epigenetic vs dietary, we'll have to fix the dietary issues first ....

Yes, we have more CFS/Lyme doctors here in the US than the UK and Canada thanks to our health care system.
The Mortality issues in the US are basically due to diet. The high infant mortality rates are due to infants being counted differently in the US than elsewhere.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality#Comparing_infant_mortality_rates

No, there are plenty of statements suggesting the Heart Disease and Diabetes were *rare* a century ago.

...paper in the Lancet medical journal titled "Recent History of Coronary Disease", by Dr. Jerry N. Morris. Dr. Morris sifted through the autopsy records of London Hospital and recorded the frequency of coronary thrombosis (artery blockage in the heart) and myocardial infarction (MI; loss of oxygen to the heart muscle) over the period 1907-1949. MI is the technical term for a heart attack, and it can be caused by coronary thrombosis. Europe has a long history of autopsy study, and London Hospital had a long-standing policy of routine autopsies during which they kept detailed records of the state of the heart and coronary arteries. Here's what he found:

See: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2009/05/coronary-heart-disease-epidemic.html

Not all higher education is useful. Large numbers of BAs will merely devalue the BA degree, because there's not that much need for them.
The problem in the US is that the government has shielded people from the cost of higher education, so higher education becomes ever more expensive.
What we need is *cheaper* higher education.

Yes, I agree. I support ending the War on Drugs which is the cause of all those people in prison.