Here's a little bit of information that always seems to escape pro-organic folks: chemicals don't care about where they come from. For example, if you water your tomatos with Evian water, you get exactly the same benefit you would get from watering your tomatos with hose water: the plant is watered and doesn't wilt or die.
Fertilizing your plants with manure supplies them with exactly the same chemicals that fertilzing them with chemical fertilizer does. Your plant isn't looking for diazotricycloamidoinitrite*; it's looking for potassium, nitrogen, and other things. It just turns out that diazotricycloamidoinitrite* works well for getting those things inside the plant calls where they can actually use the component elements for making more plant cells.
And, in fact, there are plenty of cases where people have been made ill by organic produce--e. coli infections, parasites, etcetera--because manure can have all kinds of nasty things in it that a chemical fertilizer won't.
But for me the most pertinent fact is that all produce is organic. Damn it, show me the factory which is stamping out legumes and celery from petrochemicals and I'll change that opinion, but as far as I know all produce has to be grown and that makes it the result of an organic process which means it is ORGANIC. It sure as hell ain't inorganic.
*sigh*
*=fake chemical
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New Jersey's getting some solar plants. Cost per megawatt: $6.4 million.
Compare with a cost-per-megawatt of $2 million for coal. Yeah. You can put three and a quarter megawatts of coal generation on-line for the cost of one solar megawatt. And people wonder why "renewable" energy sources aren't more widespread? Because they're not cost-effective, you morons!
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I'm in a bit of an ornery mood today.
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So, let's say you're the gambling type, and you go to Vegas for a week. You're having a grand old time, and you are winning, baby! You can't make a bad bet!
Thursday afternoon, you're on top of the world, and you realize you're "up" to the tune of $50,000. Awesome!
...well, Friday doesn't go so well, and you lose nearly $40,000, leaving you with $10,500. Still, that puts your trip comfortably in the black.
Then you go home to Hawaii.
As things stand now, you've got to pay tax on that $10,500. That's reasonable; it's not inconceivable that gambling winnings can be treated as "income". But if the Hawaii state government gets its way you'll pay income tax on the $50,000, not the $10,500 you actually kept.
That is horseshit.
...especially since the article claims this will net the State of Hawaii exactly $300,000 in extra income. WTF.
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Yes, our electrical grid is vulnerable to EMP. I like how the non-scientific among us are only now realizing just how vulnerable we are to nuclear weapons.
All one needs to wreak some serious EMP damage, he charges, is a sea-worthy steamer, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then fling the device high into the air and detonate its warhead.There is nothing in that quote which has not been posted on the Fungus time and time again.
Such a system might not paralyze the entire United States, he concedes. "But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it's as good as a bulls eye."
I'm telling you, once you have the nuclear weapon, actually doing the EMP burst is not all that damned difficult, and you don't even need an intercontinental missile to do it. All you need is a ship, a launcher, and some people who don't mind dying if they can hang one on the Great Satan beforehand--and none of those things are particularly difficult to obtain in the middle east.
In fact, the only hard part is the nuclear warhead...and guess which terror-sponsoring nation is doing its damnedest to build its own nuclear warheads?
And as I've said before, the power grid isn't the only thing vulnerable to EMP. EMP fries integrated circuits, and the more complex they are the easier it is to fry them. Every computer within 100 miles of the warhead is going to need to be repaired or--more likely--replaced. (That includes the computers which control the fuel injection hardware in cars and trucks, I might add.)
But our dear President has told us that Iran is a little country and can't possibly hurt us, and he went to Harvard, so of course he's better and smarter than the rest of us and we should not worry. Right?
*puke*
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Two links about minimum wage:
Some churches are for a $10 minimum. "People need a living wage," we are told.
John Stossel, the smartest man at ABC, thinks it's a bad idea. For one thing, it reduces employment by pricing labor too high for some jobs.
Minimum wage is ultimately inflationary. Pay someone $10 per hour to flip hamburgers and you have to charge more for each hamburger flipped. The end result is that prices go higher and those earning minimum wage have no more purchasing power than they did before the minimum wage was raised.
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In general I don't think Chris Rock is funny. Mostly I find him annoying. But today Dennis embeds a clip from The Chris Rock Show which I laughed out loud at.
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Interesting point, that. Let me run down the list.
Exercise: I work Logistics. Check.
Sleep: I am told I sleep too much. Check.
A significant other: I have a fiancee. Check.
A hobby: Other than WoW? Working on cars. Anime. Drawing manga. Writing SF. Check.
WoW-themed Mountain Dew: uhh...
Well, I don't know if I actually need it, but it's the one thing on that list I don't actually have or get. I did try it; the Alliance flavor tasted okay but turned my poop green and probably gave me the runs to boot; the Horde flavor was about what you'd expect a soda for orcs and trolls to taste like, thus I liked it less than the Alliance flavor.
So I guess the graph is accurate, to a degree.