I have discussed why machines and automation are not dehumanizing several times now. What I have missed, until now, is what things are dehumanizing. The time has come...
Machines and automation are not dehumanizing, because they are one of the ultimate expressions of humanity. The ability to build tools that work entirely on their own is one of the most important things that make humans unique. So, if machines are not dehumanizing, what things are?
Something is dehumanizing when it rejects the things that make humans unique among the life found on Earth. A great example is any form of primitivism. The idea that we should abandon modern technology and go "back to the land" is a popular form of dehumanization in some places. This movement boils down to the idea that humans should be less like humans and more like animals, which is the very definition of dehumanizing. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Another form of dehumanization that is especially popular is the attempt to define the "correct" role of humans in the food chain. This includes the vegan and vegetarian movements, but it also includes people who go around bragging that they are "carnivores." The uniqueness of humans includes an incredibly high level of adaptability. Claiming that humans should or should not eat certain classes of food rejects a valuable element of that adaptability. Keep in mind that ancient American natives often spent the winters eating nothing but meat, because nothing else was available. At the same time, poor populations throughout history often ate little or no meat during certain seasons and famines. Humans have the ability to survive on very wide range of diets, and attempting to define and enforce dietary categories qualifies as dehumanizing.
Humans are good at a wide variety of things. Most of the uniqueness of humans comes from our ability to innovate and adapt. We have made an enormous number of innovations to allow ourselves to adapt to a wide range of conditions. As the human population on Earth is continuously increasing, we are beginning to predict things like resource shortages. We are already doing many things to prepare for this, despite the fact that it is clear we are not much closer to serious overpopulation than we were during the scares of the '60s and '70s (and several much earlier ones as well). Our farming technology has advanced extremely rapidly over the last several centuries, and there is little sign of slowing. Our industrial farming techniques, while unsustainable and destructive, allow a tiny portion of the U.S. population to produce five times as much food as we eat. More sustainable hydroponics have become viable enough that you can find hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables in some grocery stores. Genetic engineering has allowed us to reduce crop losses to pests and weeds, and it is promising more flavorful, healthier fruits and vegetables within the next decade or so. This ability to adapt, all the way down to editing genes to improve our food, is very uniquely human. There are movements against all of these things though. We have the organic food movement attacking industrial farming and hydroponics. We have the anti-GMO crowd attacking directly improving foods by altering their genetics. This is what is dehumanizing. These movements are rejecting the very things that make us human.
Another serious effort at dehumanization is the anti-vax movement. Yes, in the past there have been potential problems with vaccines. For some very small groups even a subset of currently existing vaccines represent a potential for harm. The fact though, is that vaccines are not harmful in the least for a vast majority of people. Now, I generally recommend becoming informed (for real, not just reading anti-vax propaganda; informed means you learn from experts, not uneducated celebrities and quack journalists), and I am not rescinding that recommendation. Aside from these extremely small groups that vaccines pose potential risks for, the refusal of effective vaccines is another form of dehumanization.
In general, any "natural" movement is probably pushing an agenda that is dehumanizing. Yes, we should take responsibility for things like our health and keeping the Earth habitable for humans, but when someone says that something is better merely because it is natural, they are trying to dehumanize people. Artificial sweeteners might be unnatural, but a vast majority are less dangerous than excessive sugar intake. Artificial stimulants are often safer than natural ones. Nature has produced a very large number of deadly poisons, including some that can kill a person in anywhere from 30 seconds down to well under 1 second. In fact, even many of the worst illegal drugs come straight from plants, and most of those that don't are purer synthetic versions of the same substances from plants or very similar ones. Pushing "natural" products purely because they are natural is dehumanizing, because it rejects the ability of humans to transcend nature.
The fact is, humans are fantastically powerful beings, compared to the entire rest of Earth's population of living things. Our power lies in our ability to transcend the limitations of nature. When we question our ability to transcend nature, we deny our humanity. Humanity is at its most human when it is improving on nature. The further we deviate from nature, the more human and less natural we become, and this is a good thing, because it increases our ability to survive. When we arbitrarily reject the man made, that is what is dehumanizing.
17 December 2016
12 December 2016
Why We Should Question Evolution
First, this is not a discussion on religious alternatives to evolution. For full disclosure, I am religious, however, I also do not believe that God goes about doing things by unnatural means, when there are viable natural alternatives. That said, I could be wrong, and God will do things however He sees fit.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
15 November 2016
Why a Single Payer System is Better
There are a lot of problems with a single payer system. A single payer system is a healthcare system where the government pretty much just pays all medical bills. It's a popular government healthcare system in Europe, but it comes with a list of problems.
In the U.S., the biggest arguments against a single payer system include long wait lists for medical care, higher taxes, and death panels. These are certainly serious accusations, and most of them are even true. That does not mean that a single payer system is inherently bad though.
Comparatively, a single payer system is pretty good. The primary stated goal of Obamacare was to help poor people to afford healthcare better. In reality, it hardly helped anyone. Initially, it helped some people find existing affordable healthcare, but the primary group this helped was the lower middle class, a group that could already afford health insurance, but was paying more for it than necessary. Most of the poor who could not afford health insurance were not magically provided with options that fit their budgets, and the fine imposed for not buying health insurance does not apply to anyone below the middle class, because it is covered by standard deductions. Of course, the rich are who really paid for it, because many of the rich can already afford to pay medical bills out-of-pocket and wealthy people tend to be healthier in the first place, thus needing less medical care. This would not have been such a bad thing, if Obamacare had actually helped anyone in the first place, but it had a very bad start and it got worse from there. Even now, those in the small group that it may have made a slight difference for are getting priced out of the market, as Obamacare approved health insurance providers are starting to increase their prices. In short, nearly anything is better than Obamacare, even a single payer system.
Compared to Obamacare a single payer system starts off by actually helping poor people, who cannot afford their own healthcare or insurance. A single payer system will actually do the job Obamacare was supposedly designed to do. Because a single payer system automatically covers everyone, it will lose the overhead of medicare, medicaid, and any other system that has to hire a vast staff of administrators to make sure every single applicant meets the requirements for qualifying. This overhead is enormous for pretty much any form of government welfare restricted to low income individuals and families. We will discuss this more in a moment, but even the tax cost of a single payer system is less of an economic burden than Obamacare, which includes profit margins, administration, and shareholder benefits for the insurance companies. Given that much of the cost of Obamacare is on rich people who don't strictly need health insurance in the first place, it is possible that even the higher taxes won't cost as much to the rich as Obamacare does.
What we had before Obamacare was Medicaid and Medicare, which helped only very narrow portions of the population. These programs missed a huge swath of poor, who made too much money to qualify, but who still could not afford healthcare without help. It was pretty clear back then that something needed to be done, but the Republicans wouldn't touch government healthcare with a 10 foot pole, and the result was that a horribly bad Democratic "compromise" got put in place to plague us for the better part of a decade. Many Republicans and even some Democrats think that the previous system of approximately nothing is better than Obamacare, and they are probably right, but repealing Obamacare and stopping there still leaves us with a major problem. The reason anyone thought Obamacare might be a good idea is that we had (and still have) a serious healthcare problem in the U.S.
Sentencing people to death for poverty is wrong, and sins of omission are still sins. Somehow, the less religious left seems to understand this, but the highly religious right does not. Most religions, and especially Christianity, teach that the rich should help the poor. Many go so far as to assert that to withhold aid is to be responsible for whatever happens to the person. The interesting thing is that no religion teaches that aid should come exclusively from individuals, without any government involvement. As far as I am concerned, if people vote to be taxed more so that the government can provide for the poor, not only is this sufficient to meet the requirements of deity, it is also far more efficient than millions of people spending billions of hours looking for poor people to help. I am not going to bother trying to argue this point with a focus on less religious people, because I am pretty sure they already understand this. Anyhow, the fact is, we can't just let people die because they are poor! Poor people need healthcare too, and neither Obamacare nor what was there before are sufficient to meet this need.
Besides the fact that poor people need healthcare too, there are some practical considerations that make a single payer system better than what we currently have, with or without Obamacare. The first is that the government is already paying for some healthcare and hospitals are footing the bill for a lot more. As I mentioned before, Medicare and Medicaid have a great deal of administrative costs in making sure people who get it meet the requirements. Going through applicants bank records and doing background checks to make sure people are not trying to cheat the system is actually quite expensive, and some estimates suggest more than half of the money spent on these programs goes into this administration. A single payer system has minimal administrative costs comparatively. Second, there are Federal laws requiring hospitals to serve certain classes of patients whether they can pay or not, and often the hospitals end up footing the bill. What this means is that hospitals have to charge paying patients more to make up these costs. Costs for patients who cannot pay add up to a lot more than just the healthcare costs though. Hospitals often end up paying collections agencies to harass these people for up to several years, in an attempt to recover some of the costs. Often this is a losing battle, benefiting only the collections agency getting paid by the hospital. There are also losses in the form of interest (either potential interest on the money owed or business debt interest that the hospital has to pay, because it does not have the money to pay the debt off sooner). This costs pretty much everyone. The government loses, because it cannot tax money owed that is never paid. Poor people lose out, because hospitals are tempted to provide inferior service to get the poor patients out so they have more room for paying patients. Paying patients pay more, because someone has to pay for the care given to the poor. Health insurance companies also pay more, for the same reason paying patients do. In short, our current system is costing tons of overhead.
So how does a single payer system compare? A well designed single payer system covers most non-elective healthcare no-questions-asked. This means no administrative overhead for making sure people don't cheat. It also covered rich and poor equally. This means that it actually does help the poor. One worry with a single payer system is long waiting lists, and this has been a problem in the past. Almost three decades ago, it was common in many European countries to have waiting lists for visiting doctors up to three months long. It was a running joke in the U.K. that most people ended up in the emergency room before getting to the top the waiting list. This is no longer the case though. Waiting lists on the order of a week or two are not uncommon, but I have not heard of anyone having to wait much longer than that in almost a decade. The European single payer systems have gotten so fast and efficient that sometimes Americans visit Europe for an extended stay for the high quality state-paid health care, and their healthcare systems are efficient enough that they don't even mind this. I once told someone raving about socialized healthcare that if their claims that it worked well were right, we should do it immediately, but that their claims were not right, and that it did not work well enough to be worth doing. Well, that time has come. If we use successful systems as a model for our own, it will work significantly better than anything we have ever had.
The tax question comes down to the fact that even if it does end up costing more in taxes, taking the burden off of the hospitals will be beneficial enough to our economy to make up for it. And frankly, I am not entirely convinced that it will cost much more in taxes, given how much money eliminating the anti-cheating infrastructure will save.
That covers everything but death panels. I am pretty sure death panels was an idea thought up by people opposed to any kind of socialized healthcare. It was recognized by opponents early on that any kind of socialized health care must have limits, or we will end up keep tons of medically dead people physically alive at great cost without any benefits. These opponents took this idea, turned it into groups of people who decide how gets medical care and who does not and named them "death panels." The need for these is certainly a concern, but one look at the current system should make it obvious that it is less of a concern than the current situation. Currently, when a person is on the verge of death and only being kept alive by machines, the question of life or death belongs to the hospital and any relatives of the person. The decisions are made primarily on financial and emotional concerns. People are allowed to die in hospitals regularly, because their families can no longer afford the medical bills and don't want to get into huge amounts of debt. At the same time, people who are medically dead are regularly kept alive for days, weeks, or months because family members just cannot bear to let them go. It is a travesty that cost of healthcare is a dominating factor in live and death, and this is one thing that a single payer system would fix. With a single payer system removing the financial factor though, it is very reasonable to assume that a lot of people would want to keep their medically hopeless relatives alive indefinitely, holding out on some one in a million chance of miraculous recovery, and this would make the tax burden of a single payer system untenable. Government rules could be made to govern cases like this, but there are so many fringe cases that legislation is bound to fail in a great number of them. The best solution is to get panels of experts to objectively consider things like probability of recovery. Yeah, the idea of death panels sucks, but it is already better than how it currently works!
Besides the fact that death panels are a better system than deferring to financial concerns and emotions in making these decisions, they also don't have to be the final word. Death panels would not be deciding whether people live and die. They would only be deciding whether or not the government will continue paying for the care of a patient who seems unlikely to recover. Continued care would up to anyone who might be willing and capable of paying for it. Most single payer systems allow people to pay for their own healthcare out-of-pocket. This allows people who can afford it to circumvent government restrictions on healthcare, and while this might seem unfair, it is no less fair than our current system. In addition, this allows health insurance companies to remain relevant. In countries with single payer systems, customers that can pay out-of-pocket often have access to premium healthcare that is not available a normal government pay scales. Again, this may seem unfair, but the government paid healthcare is generally comparable, if not better than the average healthcare currently available in the U.S. (see Canada, where the free government healthcare is often considered significantly better than standard healthcare in the U.S.), so there is no loss of quality to people using government paid healthcare.
What it all comes down to is, a single payer system is more effective, cheaper, and better for the economy than anything we have had in the U.S. so far, including Obamacare and completely private healthcare, and even the scare tactic idea of death panels is both better than the current system and easy enough to circumvent for anyone that could afford it in the current system. As a national healthcare solution, the single payer system has been turned into a well oiled machine in Europe, and if we are smart enough to learn from their mistakes and successes, we can have a successful single payer system ourselves, that works properly right out of the gates (unlike Obamacare).
In the U.S., the biggest arguments against a single payer system include long wait lists for medical care, higher taxes, and death panels. These are certainly serious accusations, and most of them are even true. That does not mean that a single payer system is inherently bad though.
Comparatively, a single payer system is pretty good. The primary stated goal of Obamacare was to help poor people to afford healthcare better. In reality, it hardly helped anyone. Initially, it helped some people find existing affordable healthcare, but the primary group this helped was the lower middle class, a group that could already afford health insurance, but was paying more for it than necessary. Most of the poor who could not afford health insurance were not magically provided with options that fit their budgets, and the fine imposed for not buying health insurance does not apply to anyone below the middle class, because it is covered by standard deductions. Of course, the rich are who really paid for it, because many of the rich can already afford to pay medical bills out-of-pocket and wealthy people tend to be healthier in the first place, thus needing less medical care. This would not have been such a bad thing, if Obamacare had actually helped anyone in the first place, but it had a very bad start and it got worse from there. Even now, those in the small group that it may have made a slight difference for are getting priced out of the market, as Obamacare approved health insurance providers are starting to increase their prices. In short, nearly anything is better than Obamacare, even a single payer system.
Compared to Obamacare a single payer system starts off by actually helping poor people, who cannot afford their own healthcare or insurance. A single payer system will actually do the job Obamacare was supposedly designed to do. Because a single payer system automatically covers everyone, it will lose the overhead of medicare, medicaid, and any other system that has to hire a vast staff of administrators to make sure every single applicant meets the requirements for qualifying. This overhead is enormous for pretty much any form of government welfare restricted to low income individuals and families. We will discuss this more in a moment, but even the tax cost of a single payer system is less of an economic burden than Obamacare, which includes profit margins, administration, and shareholder benefits for the insurance companies. Given that much of the cost of Obamacare is on rich people who don't strictly need health insurance in the first place, it is possible that even the higher taxes won't cost as much to the rich as Obamacare does.
What we had before Obamacare was Medicaid and Medicare, which helped only very narrow portions of the population. These programs missed a huge swath of poor, who made too much money to qualify, but who still could not afford healthcare without help. It was pretty clear back then that something needed to be done, but the Republicans wouldn't touch government healthcare with a 10 foot pole, and the result was that a horribly bad Democratic "compromise" got put in place to plague us for the better part of a decade. Many Republicans and even some Democrats think that the previous system of approximately nothing is better than Obamacare, and they are probably right, but repealing Obamacare and stopping there still leaves us with a major problem. The reason anyone thought Obamacare might be a good idea is that we had (and still have) a serious healthcare problem in the U.S.
Sentencing people to death for poverty is wrong, and sins of omission are still sins. Somehow, the less religious left seems to understand this, but the highly religious right does not. Most religions, and especially Christianity, teach that the rich should help the poor. Many go so far as to assert that to withhold aid is to be responsible for whatever happens to the person. The interesting thing is that no religion teaches that aid should come exclusively from individuals, without any government involvement. As far as I am concerned, if people vote to be taxed more so that the government can provide for the poor, not only is this sufficient to meet the requirements of deity, it is also far more efficient than millions of people spending billions of hours looking for poor people to help. I am not going to bother trying to argue this point with a focus on less religious people, because I am pretty sure they already understand this. Anyhow, the fact is, we can't just let people die because they are poor! Poor people need healthcare too, and neither Obamacare nor what was there before are sufficient to meet this need.
Besides the fact that poor people need healthcare too, there are some practical considerations that make a single payer system better than what we currently have, with or without Obamacare. The first is that the government is already paying for some healthcare and hospitals are footing the bill for a lot more. As I mentioned before, Medicare and Medicaid have a great deal of administrative costs in making sure people who get it meet the requirements. Going through applicants bank records and doing background checks to make sure people are not trying to cheat the system is actually quite expensive, and some estimates suggest more than half of the money spent on these programs goes into this administration. A single payer system has minimal administrative costs comparatively. Second, there are Federal laws requiring hospitals to serve certain classes of patients whether they can pay or not, and often the hospitals end up footing the bill. What this means is that hospitals have to charge paying patients more to make up these costs. Costs for patients who cannot pay add up to a lot more than just the healthcare costs though. Hospitals often end up paying collections agencies to harass these people for up to several years, in an attempt to recover some of the costs. Often this is a losing battle, benefiting only the collections agency getting paid by the hospital. There are also losses in the form of interest (either potential interest on the money owed or business debt interest that the hospital has to pay, because it does not have the money to pay the debt off sooner). This costs pretty much everyone. The government loses, because it cannot tax money owed that is never paid. Poor people lose out, because hospitals are tempted to provide inferior service to get the poor patients out so they have more room for paying patients. Paying patients pay more, because someone has to pay for the care given to the poor. Health insurance companies also pay more, for the same reason paying patients do. In short, our current system is costing tons of overhead.
So how does a single payer system compare? A well designed single payer system covers most non-elective healthcare no-questions-asked. This means no administrative overhead for making sure people don't cheat. It also covered rich and poor equally. This means that it actually does help the poor. One worry with a single payer system is long waiting lists, and this has been a problem in the past. Almost three decades ago, it was common in many European countries to have waiting lists for visiting doctors up to three months long. It was a running joke in the U.K. that most people ended up in the emergency room before getting to the top the waiting list. This is no longer the case though. Waiting lists on the order of a week or two are not uncommon, but I have not heard of anyone having to wait much longer than that in almost a decade. The European single payer systems have gotten so fast and efficient that sometimes Americans visit Europe for an extended stay for the high quality state-paid health care, and their healthcare systems are efficient enough that they don't even mind this. I once told someone raving about socialized healthcare that if their claims that it worked well were right, we should do it immediately, but that their claims were not right, and that it did not work well enough to be worth doing. Well, that time has come. If we use successful systems as a model for our own, it will work significantly better than anything we have ever had.
The tax question comes down to the fact that even if it does end up costing more in taxes, taking the burden off of the hospitals will be beneficial enough to our economy to make up for it. And frankly, I am not entirely convinced that it will cost much more in taxes, given how much money eliminating the anti-cheating infrastructure will save.
That covers everything but death panels. I am pretty sure death panels was an idea thought up by people opposed to any kind of socialized healthcare. It was recognized by opponents early on that any kind of socialized health care must have limits, or we will end up keep tons of medically dead people physically alive at great cost without any benefits. These opponents took this idea, turned it into groups of people who decide how gets medical care and who does not and named them "death panels." The need for these is certainly a concern, but one look at the current system should make it obvious that it is less of a concern than the current situation. Currently, when a person is on the verge of death and only being kept alive by machines, the question of life or death belongs to the hospital and any relatives of the person. The decisions are made primarily on financial and emotional concerns. People are allowed to die in hospitals regularly, because their families can no longer afford the medical bills and don't want to get into huge amounts of debt. At the same time, people who are medically dead are regularly kept alive for days, weeks, or months because family members just cannot bear to let them go. It is a travesty that cost of healthcare is a dominating factor in live and death, and this is one thing that a single payer system would fix. With a single payer system removing the financial factor though, it is very reasonable to assume that a lot of people would want to keep their medically hopeless relatives alive indefinitely, holding out on some one in a million chance of miraculous recovery, and this would make the tax burden of a single payer system untenable. Government rules could be made to govern cases like this, but there are so many fringe cases that legislation is bound to fail in a great number of them. The best solution is to get panels of experts to objectively consider things like probability of recovery. Yeah, the idea of death panels sucks, but it is already better than how it currently works!
Besides the fact that death panels are a better system than deferring to financial concerns and emotions in making these decisions, they also don't have to be the final word. Death panels would not be deciding whether people live and die. They would only be deciding whether or not the government will continue paying for the care of a patient who seems unlikely to recover. Continued care would up to anyone who might be willing and capable of paying for it. Most single payer systems allow people to pay for their own healthcare out-of-pocket. This allows people who can afford it to circumvent government restrictions on healthcare, and while this might seem unfair, it is no less fair than our current system. In addition, this allows health insurance companies to remain relevant. In countries with single payer systems, customers that can pay out-of-pocket often have access to premium healthcare that is not available a normal government pay scales. Again, this may seem unfair, but the government paid healthcare is generally comparable, if not better than the average healthcare currently available in the U.S. (see Canada, where the free government healthcare is often considered significantly better than standard healthcare in the U.S.), so there is no loss of quality to people using government paid healthcare.
What it all comes down to is, a single payer system is more effective, cheaper, and better for the economy than anything we have had in the U.S. so far, including Obamacare and completely private healthcare, and even the scare tactic idea of death panels is both better than the current system and easy enough to circumvent for anyone that could afford it in the current system. As a national healthcare solution, the single payer system has been turned into a well oiled machine in Europe, and if we are smart enough to learn from their mistakes and successes, we can have a successful single payer system ourselves, that works properly right out of the gates (unlike Obamacare).
25 August 2016
Are GMO's radioactive?
I was under the impression that most people have at least a basic understanding of radiation. It looks like I was sadly wrong, though I suppose the necessity of a YouTube video explaining what radiation is in the first place should have been a dead giveaway. Yesterday I wrote a blog post on why saying that GMOs are carcinogens is just plain wrong. Well, today one of anti-GMO people in the YouTube discussion asked if GMOs are tested for radiation. This displays an extreme lack of understanding of radiation and a disturbing lack of willingness to spend 5 minutes Googling something to get even the most basic information before making rather absurd claims about it. So, for those who actually care about being right, it is time for a discussion on radiation.
The simple answer to the question "Are GMOs radioactive?" is no. The reaction you are likely to get from pretty much any scientist who knows anything about radiation, when you ask this question is, "Wait, what the heck are you talking about?"
The long answer starts with the question: How do things become radioactive? First though, perhaps we should look at what radiation is in the first place.
Technically, radiation is any kind of electromagnetic energy that that is moving through space. This includes things like radio waves, visible light, certain forms of heat, as well as UV from the sun, x-rays, and gamma rays. It also traditionally includes certain other types of particles flung through space at extremely high speeds. When people talk about dangerous radiation, they are usually talking about a few specific kinds. There are three kinds of radiation that are generally emitted by radioactive particles. Alpha radiation is the least dangerous, at least in most circumstances. Alpha radiation is when a radioactive atom ejects two protons bound together as helium, at extremely high speeds. This helium nucleus has enough energy to do a great deal of damage, but it is not generally dangerous to humans, because it cannot penetrate the skin. Ingested, however, it could do substantial damage. The second type of radiation is beta radiation, which is just an electron or positron ejected at high speed. This is generally considered more dangerous, because it can penetrate skin, but it generally does less damage than alpha radiation. If a beta decay produces a positron, however, when the positron meets with an electron, they will destroy each other, potentially releasing more dangerous radiation. The last type of radiation is gamma radiation. This is just a form of electromagnetic radiation (much like radio waves or visible light), except that it carries far more energy. Gamma radiation is considered the most dangerous form of radiation, because it can penetrate all the way through the body easily, and it can damage DNA, potentially causing cancer. Keep in mind though, it takes a lot of radiation of any kind to do significant damage. One or two or even a few hundred atoms won't do enough damage to detect.
One more thing that is important to keep in mind is that gamma radiation is not some rare thing that we only see from radioactive substances. Stars and black holes that are many of light years away are producing large amounts of gamma radiation, and very small amounts of that are constantly passing through Earth and through us. There are also other kinds of less well understood radiation in the form of energetic particles from space, called cosmic radiation, that can occasionally interact with DNA, also potentially causing cancer. There is no way to prevent this, though, so we don't generally worry to much about it, and there really is not that much reaching Earth. Most cases of cancer are due to either consuming non-radioactive carcinogens or just normal random mistakes that occur in cells all the time.
So now that we know more about radiation, how do things become radioactive? Just like calling an object carcinogenic, technically calling an object radioactive is wrong. Atoms are radioactive. It is common to call objects containing large numbers of radioactive atoms radioactive though. How does an atom become radioactive? It is complicated, and it requires a lot of energy. One of the simplest radioactive atoms is hydrogen-3, also known as tritium, and it is used in hydrogen bombs. The thing that makes it unique is that it has 2 neutrons and only 1 proton, and having significantly more neutrons (twice as many, here) than protons makes atoms unstable (too few neutrons can also cause instability). It decays into helium-2 (which is stable; that means it is not radioactive) via beta decay, emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino (which we won't worry about, because it does not interact much with ordinary matter). Most hydrogen-3 is produced in nuclear reactors, but it can also be extracted from sea water. It is not very common, but it is constantly being produced in oceans when hydrogen in water is hit by certain kinds of cosmic radiation, adding a neutron to the more common hydrogen-2 (which has 1 neutron). In nuclear reactors it is produced the same way, by radiation (usually energetic neutrons) that is emitted from the nuclear reactions that produce energy used to generate electricity. Tritium is safe enough that it is used to make glow-in-the-dark key chains in many places in the world (this is illegal in the U.S., not for safety reasons, but because tritium is also used in hydrogen bombs). More dangerous radioactive elements are generally heavy elements, which are primarily produced in super novas of stars. Regular stars cannot create elements heavier than about iron. Not all heavy elements are naturally radioactive, though a few have radioactive isotopes (an isotope is defined by its number of neutrons, so hydrogen-3 is a different isotope of hydrogen from hydrogen-2). In nature, radioactive elements tend to decay until they become stable elements (or isotopes), but some take millions of years to do this. Uranium is probably one of the most well known radioactive elements, but Radium was one of the first discovered. Radioactive elements can be created in labs, but it takes enormous amounts of energy. Naturally occurring radioactive elements are rare, but they can be found in some places. What it comes down to though is that radioactive elements require huge amounts of energy to make, and they can only be made in large quantities in nuclear reactors and exploding stars.
What about GMOs? How could they become radioactive? The uneducated masses that claim GMOs are radioactive seem to believe that GMOs just magically become radioactive, because they are GMOs. This is completely false. Changing an organisms DNA will not make that organism suddenly radioactive. Some may believe that GMOs can produce radioactive substances, but given the energy required for humans to deliberately make them, it seems incredibly unlikely. Further though, we have never observed an organism that could do this, and if we had, we would certainly be using it to make reactor fuel or even to turn lead to gold. If messing with atoms was that easy, alchemists would have figured this one out hundreds of years ago. In addition, the amount of energy required for a plant to create significant amounts of radioactive atoms is more than any plant has ever collected (even those ancient Redwoods in California would fail this one). The fact is, it is practically impossible. The last problem with GMOs producing radioactive atoms is that if they produced enough to be harmful to humans, they would destroy themselves long before they were ready to harvest. It is just not feasible to claim that GMOs can create radioactive atoms.
If GMOs cannot create radioactive atoms though, perhaps there are other ways they could acquire them. This is true, there are other ways. The most likely way would be for humans to deliberately put them there, but there is no reason for any for-profit company to deliberately kill off their paying customers, and besides, it would be extremely expensive to put enough in to be dangerous. Is it possible it could be happening accidentally? No here too. Modern genetic modification processes work by taking genes (which are just sections of DNA; no radioactive atoms there) from a donor plant and inserting them into the subject plant. This process does not involved enough energy to make radioactive atoms, and it does not involve the use of any radioactive materials, so there is no chance for the resulting GMOs to be radioactive. What about the old technique of bombarding cells with radiation to cause random mutations? This technique probably could create radioactive isotopes, depending on the type of radiation used, but there is no way it could produce more than a very small amount. The problem we have here is that radiation kills things in large amounts, and if you are merely trying to mutate a cell by modifying its DNA you really don't want to kill it. The odds of making more than a few radioactive atoms doing this is extremely low. In fact, it is so low that many companies use irradiation to sterilize chicken eggs before sending them to the retail stores (this is enough radiation to kill stuff, since the goal is to kill bacteria). If there are not enough radioactive atoms in those to be harmful, there certainly won't be in a few plant cells or even a whole seed. Even if there was though, unless the plant is producing radioactive atoms (which it cannot), any radioactive atoms will almost certainly not end up in the edible part of the plant, and _even if they did,_ they would be so diluted that there would not be enough to be dangerous.
There is one other way GMO plants could acquire radioactive atoms, but it is not unique to GMOs. If there are already radioactive isotopes of atoms that are normally absorbed by a plant in the soil it is growing in, then that plant would very likely absorb those atoms along with the non-radioactive isotopes of it. It does not matter if a plant is GMO or not for this to occur though; it will happen with any kind of plant. In theory, this could result in food that is radioactive enough to be harmful, but there is still one problem. If the plant absorbs enough radioactive atoms to harm a human, the radiation will also harm the plant, and probably far more severely than a human. Radiation does its damage in several ways, but the most dangerous is by damaging DNA. This is nothing like adding a gene to a cell though. Radiation has a lot of energy, which means that it could heat a very small part of a strand of DNA, causing a break that prevents it from being read properly. This would likely result in mutant proteins being created, which could tell a cell to multiply uncontrollably, resulting in cancer. Thankfully, most DNA damage just results in the death of the cell, eliminating any further potential for damage. High concentrations of radiation don't just damage DNA though. It can kill a lot of cells, which is what causes radiation sickness. Now, think about a corn plant. It has a lot less mass than a person. So a safe amount of radiation for a person could harm a corn plant. Enough radiation to cause significant harm to a person would harm the corn plant even more, and since plant cells generally divide a lot faster than human cells, the effect would be further amplified (because the damaged DNA is reproduced more). In other words, enough radiation to seriously harm a human would almost certainly kill the corn plant long before it produced any corn. Even if it didn't though, the severe DNA damage would probably mutate the corn plant enough that it would be extremely obvious that something is very wrong with it.
What it all comes down to is that even the old method of genetic modification does not make something radioactive enough to have any more impact than naturally occurring radiation coming from the stars and from space. Plants cannot make radioactive atoms. If plants were picking up radioactive atoms from their farm lands (it would not matter if they would GMO plants or not), if it were amounts harmful to humans, it would kill or otherwise destroy the plants before any food was produced. And even if a for-profit company was stupid enough to make their GMO seeds radioactive, most of the radioactive atoms would be left in the roots and lower stem of the plant, and anything that did get to the edible part would emit less dangerous radiation than the sky (from stars and blackholes and such).
Like I said, the short answer is no, GMOs are not radioactive.
The simple answer to the question "Are GMOs radioactive?" is no. The reaction you are likely to get from pretty much any scientist who knows anything about radiation, when you ask this question is, "Wait, what the heck are you talking about?"
The long answer starts with the question: How do things become radioactive? First though, perhaps we should look at what radiation is in the first place.
Technically, radiation is any kind of electromagnetic energy that that is moving through space. This includes things like radio waves, visible light, certain forms of heat, as well as UV from the sun, x-rays, and gamma rays. It also traditionally includes certain other types of particles flung through space at extremely high speeds. When people talk about dangerous radiation, they are usually talking about a few specific kinds. There are three kinds of radiation that are generally emitted by radioactive particles. Alpha radiation is the least dangerous, at least in most circumstances. Alpha radiation is when a radioactive atom ejects two protons bound together as helium, at extremely high speeds. This helium nucleus has enough energy to do a great deal of damage, but it is not generally dangerous to humans, because it cannot penetrate the skin. Ingested, however, it could do substantial damage. The second type of radiation is beta radiation, which is just an electron or positron ejected at high speed. This is generally considered more dangerous, because it can penetrate skin, but it generally does less damage than alpha radiation. If a beta decay produces a positron, however, when the positron meets with an electron, they will destroy each other, potentially releasing more dangerous radiation. The last type of radiation is gamma radiation. This is just a form of electromagnetic radiation (much like radio waves or visible light), except that it carries far more energy. Gamma radiation is considered the most dangerous form of radiation, because it can penetrate all the way through the body easily, and it can damage DNA, potentially causing cancer. Keep in mind though, it takes a lot of radiation of any kind to do significant damage. One or two or even a few hundred atoms won't do enough damage to detect.
One more thing that is important to keep in mind is that gamma radiation is not some rare thing that we only see from radioactive substances. Stars and black holes that are many of light years away are producing large amounts of gamma radiation, and very small amounts of that are constantly passing through Earth and through us. There are also other kinds of less well understood radiation in the form of energetic particles from space, called cosmic radiation, that can occasionally interact with DNA, also potentially causing cancer. There is no way to prevent this, though, so we don't generally worry to much about it, and there really is not that much reaching Earth. Most cases of cancer are due to either consuming non-radioactive carcinogens or just normal random mistakes that occur in cells all the time.
So now that we know more about radiation, how do things become radioactive? Just like calling an object carcinogenic, technically calling an object radioactive is wrong. Atoms are radioactive. It is common to call objects containing large numbers of radioactive atoms radioactive though. How does an atom become radioactive? It is complicated, and it requires a lot of energy. One of the simplest radioactive atoms is hydrogen-3, also known as tritium, and it is used in hydrogen bombs. The thing that makes it unique is that it has 2 neutrons and only 1 proton, and having significantly more neutrons (twice as many, here) than protons makes atoms unstable (too few neutrons can also cause instability). It decays into helium-2 (which is stable; that means it is not radioactive) via beta decay, emitting an electron and an electron anti-neutrino (which we won't worry about, because it does not interact much with ordinary matter). Most hydrogen-3 is produced in nuclear reactors, but it can also be extracted from sea water. It is not very common, but it is constantly being produced in oceans when hydrogen in water is hit by certain kinds of cosmic radiation, adding a neutron to the more common hydrogen-2 (which has 1 neutron). In nuclear reactors it is produced the same way, by radiation (usually energetic neutrons) that is emitted from the nuclear reactions that produce energy used to generate electricity. Tritium is safe enough that it is used to make glow-in-the-dark key chains in many places in the world (this is illegal in the U.S., not for safety reasons, but because tritium is also used in hydrogen bombs). More dangerous radioactive elements are generally heavy elements, which are primarily produced in super novas of stars. Regular stars cannot create elements heavier than about iron. Not all heavy elements are naturally radioactive, though a few have radioactive isotopes (an isotope is defined by its number of neutrons, so hydrogen-3 is a different isotope of hydrogen from hydrogen-2). In nature, radioactive elements tend to decay until they become stable elements (or isotopes), but some take millions of years to do this. Uranium is probably one of the most well known radioactive elements, but Radium was one of the first discovered. Radioactive elements can be created in labs, but it takes enormous amounts of energy. Naturally occurring radioactive elements are rare, but they can be found in some places. What it comes down to though is that radioactive elements require huge amounts of energy to make, and they can only be made in large quantities in nuclear reactors and exploding stars.
What about GMOs? How could they become radioactive? The uneducated masses that claim GMOs are radioactive seem to believe that GMOs just magically become radioactive, because they are GMOs. This is completely false. Changing an organisms DNA will not make that organism suddenly radioactive. Some may believe that GMOs can produce radioactive substances, but given the energy required for humans to deliberately make them, it seems incredibly unlikely. Further though, we have never observed an organism that could do this, and if we had, we would certainly be using it to make reactor fuel or even to turn lead to gold. If messing with atoms was that easy, alchemists would have figured this one out hundreds of years ago. In addition, the amount of energy required for a plant to create significant amounts of radioactive atoms is more than any plant has ever collected (even those ancient Redwoods in California would fail this one). The fact is, it is practically impossible. The last problem with GMOs producing radioactive atoms is that if they produced enough to be harmful to humans, they would destroy themselves long before they were ready to harvest. It is just not feasible to claim that GMOs can create radioactive atoms.
If GMOs cannot create radioactive atoms though, perhaps there are other ways they could acquire them. This is true, there are other ways. The most likely way would be for humans to deliberately put them there, but there is no reason for any for-profit company to deliberately kill off their paying customers, and besides, it would be extremely expensive to put enough in to be dangerous. Is it possible it could be happening accidentally? No here too. Modern genetic modification processes work by taking genes (which are just sections of DNA; no radioactive atoms there) from a donor plant and inserting them into the subject plant. This process does not involved enough energy to make radioactive atoms, and it does not involve the use of any radioactive materials, so there is no chance for the resulting GMOs to be radioactive. What about the old technique of bombarding cells with radiation to cause random mutations? This technique probably could create radioactive isotopes, depending on the type of radiation used, but there is no way it could produce more than a very small amount. The problem we have here is that radiation kills things in large amounts, and if you are merely trying to mutate a cell by modifying its DNA you really don't want to kill it. The odds of making more than a few radioactive atoms doing this is extremely low. In fact, it is so low that many companies use irradiation to sterilize chicken eggs before sending them to the retail stores (this is enough radiation to kill stuff, since the goal is to kill bacteria). If there are not enough radioactive atoms in those to be harmful, there certainly won't be in a few plant cells or even a whole seed. Even if there was though, unless the plant is producing radioactive atoms (which it cannot), any radioactive atoms will almost certainly not end up in the edible part of the plant, and _even if they did,_ they would be so diluted that there would not be enough to be dangerous.
There is one other way GMO plants could acquire radioactive atoms, but it is not unique to GMOs. If there are already radioactive isotopes of atoms that are normally absorbed by a plant in the soil it is growing in, then that plant would very likely absorb those atoms along with the non-radioactive isotopes of it. It does not matter if a plant is GMO or not for this to occur though; it will happen with any kind of plant. In theory, this could result in food that is radioactive enough to be harmful, but there is still one problem. If the plant absorbs enough radioactive atoms to harm a human, the radiation will also harm the plant, and probably far more severely than a human. Radiation does its damage in several ways, but the most dangerous is by damaging DNA. This is nothing like adding a gene to a cell though. Radiation has a lot of energy, which means that it could heat a very small part of a strand of DNA, causing a break that prevents it from being read properly. This would likely result in mutant proteins being created, which could tell a cell to multiply uncontrollably, resulting in cancer. Thankfully, most DNA damage just results in the death of the cell, eliminating any further potential for damage. High concentrations of radiation don't just damage DNA though. It can kill a lot of cells, which is what causes radiation sickness. Now, think about a corn plant. It has a lot less mass than a person. So a safe amount of radiation for a person could harm a corn plant. Enough radiation to cause significant harm to a person would harm the corn plant even more, and since plant cells generally divide a lot faster than human cells, the effect would be further amplified (because the damaged DNA is reproduced more). In other words, enough radiation to seriously harm a human would almost certainly kill the corn plant long before it produced any corn. Even if it didn't though, the severe DNA damage would probably mutate the corn plant enough that it would be extremely obvious that something is very wrong with it.
What it all comes down to is that even the old method of genetic modification does not make something radioactive enough to have any more impact than naturally occurring radiation coming from the stars and from space. Plants cannot make radioactive atoms. If plants were picking up radioactive atoms from their farm lands (it would not matter if they would GMO plants or not), if it were amounts harmful to humans, it would kill or otherwise destroy the plants before any food was produced. And even if a for-profit company was stupid enough to make their GMO seeds radioactive, most of the radioactive atoms would be left in the roots and lower stem of the plant, and anything that did get to the edible part would emit less dangerous radiation than the sky (from stars and blackholes and such).
Like I said, the short answer is no, GMOs are not radioactive.
24 August 2016
Are GMOs carcinogenic?
In a recent debate in the comments of a YouTube video, I discovered something that is somewhat disturbing: A vast majority of people who claim that GMOs are carcinogenic don't actually know what "carcinogenic" means, and the evidence seems to indicate that they also don't know what "GMO" means either. This includes at least one person who claims to have a degree in biology with a basic understanding of genetics (a claim that I do not believe). Perhaps if I explain what these terms mean, it will help people to understand why it is absurd to claim that GMOs are carcinogenic.
The start with, what is a GMO? Based on my experience, most lay people believe that a GMO is some kind of molecule or other thing that can be in their food. GMO actually stands for Genetically Modified Organism. An organism is something alive, like a plant, an animal, a bacteria, or pretty much anything else that is alive. When we talk about GMOs in the context of food, we are generally talking about plants. So ,GMO corns does not have GMOs in it, it is a GMO. A GMO is merely an organism that has had its DNA changed in some way. When we talk about GMO plants, we are generally talking about plants that had their DNA changed deliberately and directly by humans, but technically every plant, animal, and other living creature on Earth has arisen from millions of years of natural genetic modification, and a vast majority of the plants and animals that humans eat have had their genes deliberately changed though selective breeding. Every GMO is just a regular organism that has had its DNA changed in some way that could have also happened naturally given the right conditions.
Creating GMOs is a complex process that does something simple. There are several techniques for doing it, but there is one modern technique that is used for making pretty much all GMO food plants. This technique starts by taking a plant with a specific desired trait and experimenting to figure out what gene in that plant causes the desired trait. The most well known trait used in GMOs is resistance to a specific herbicide. Another valuable trait might be more efficient nutrient use, which would be helpful in places with poor soil. Once the gene is isolated, it is removed from the plant and injected into the cells of a plant that genetic engineers want to give the trait. Genes can do a number of different things, but the most well known things genes can do is create proteins. So a gene that makes a plant pesticide resistant might create proteins that break down the molecules of the pesticide before it can damage cells. While it is theoretically possible that a gene from a plant could produce something that is toxic to humans, it is incredibly unlikely if that gene was taken from a plant that does not already product toxins that affect humans.
Now we should make sure we understand what "carcinogenic" actually means. Google defines it as "having the potential to cause cancer." It defines "carcinogen" as "a substance capable of causing cancer in living tissue." Essentially, a carcinogen is a chemical compound or element that can pass into a cell membrane and damage the DNA inside the cell in ways that cause the cell to become cancerous.
So, what about GMOs being carcinogenic? The first think to keep in mind is that technically carcinogens are compounds. Compounds are molecules made up of atoms. There are also a few carcinogenic elements, but they are rare in nature, so you don't generally find them without looking. Nothing larger than a molecule can technically be carcinogenic itself, though we typically refer to objects containing carcinogenic molecules as carcinogenic themselves. Technically though, it is not the tobacco itself that is carcinogenic, but rather it is the nicotine molecules (and a few other things) that are in the plant that are carcinogenic. In theory, we could breed a strain of tobacco without nicotine (and the other things), and it would still be tobacco, but it would not be carcinogenic, because it does not contain any carcinogens.
Now, this brings us to GMOs. The only way we can call GMOs carcinogenic is if they contain carcinogenic molecules. Non-GMO corn does not contain any carcinogens, so it is not carcinogenic. GMO corn cannot be inherently carcinogenic, because the genes we added are not carcinogenic (genes are just short pieces of DNA, and DNA is not carcinogenic, so genes cannot be). What about the plant that we took the genes from, when we made the GMO corn? Honestly, I cannot say, because I don't know what that plant was, but it is very unlikely any company would risk getting fined or shut down for knowingly taking such a risk, and since most plants don't contain carcinogens, it is safe to assume that if plants resistant to a particular herbicide exist, there are probably plenty of non-carcinogenic options. (Keep in mind, these companies want your money, and if you die from cancer because their product is carcinogenic, they are not going to make as much money from you.) Additionally, if a gene that is known to make a plant herbicide resistant is put into a non-carcinogenic plant, even if the original plant did produce carcinogenic compounds, the new GMO plant is extremely unlikely to produce carcinogens, because the genes that caused the original plant to produce them were not put into the new plant. In fact, because most carcinogenic compounds produced by plants are fairly complex molecules, it is almost certain they are produced by a chain of processes, and reproducing the entire chain of processes in another plant would likely require a lot more than just one or two genes. Making a non-carcinogenic plant produce carcinogens using genetic engineering would require deliberately doing lots of very expensive experiments to isolate all of potentially hundreds of genes involved in the process of producing that carcinogen, and there is no reason any for-profit company would spend that much money just to kill off its own customers.
To take this one step further though, there are a few processes that are far more likely to produce carcinogenic plants. The first one produced pretty much every carcinogenic plant known to man, and that process is natural selection. Tobacco was not invented by humans. It evolved the ability to produce nicotine though natural selection (though humans did use selective breeding to increase its nicotine production, but Native Americans were smoking it in religious rituals long before that). The second one, which is linked to natural selection, is radiation exposure, which can "damage" DNA. This damage modifies the DNA in a much less predictable way than modern genetic modification techniques (and was actually used in early genetic engineering study). This could cause a plant to produce carcinogens, but it would likely take hundreds or thousands of specific modification events for this to happen (and this is probably how tobacco evolved the ability to produce nicotine, over millions of years). Given that a vast majority of plants on Earth don't produce carcinogens though (over millions of years of chances), it seems that the probability of millions of years of cosmic radiation resulting in a carcinogenic plant is also incredibly small. Another process that is more likely to create a carcinogenic plant than genetic engineering is selective breeding. Just the process of reproduction is rife with potential error. Genes can get damaged, split and put back together wrong, or just end up with a bad combination. This could create carcinogenic plants from non-carcinogenic plants, but again, after millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of deliberate selective breeding by humans, you would expect to see at least one food crop that produces carcinogens if this was at all likely. So far, the only carcinogenic plants bred by humans appear to be the ones that we deliberately bred to produce carcinogens (like tobacco), and even those seem to have been made carcinogenic by nature long before humans discovered them.
What it comes down to is that GMOs are not inherently carcinogenic, and the modern processes used to make them would require deliberately spending millions of dollars and many years of work to make them carcinogenic. No one with those resources is going to go to that much effort, especially not for-profit companies that have a vested interest in the survival of their customers. Monsanto might be unethical, but they are not stupid.
Lastly, the FDA mandates that all GMOs be carefully tested for carcinogens. They are also tested for other toxic compounds, though those are just as unlikely as carcinogenic compounds if both plants are not already toxic. Note that the FDA does not require this testing for non-GMO plants, including plants produced using selective breeding, which means that there are good odds that GMO plants are actually safer than non-GMO plants.
If you want to stick to buying non-GMO foods because you don't want to support Monsanto and the way they abuse gene patents, fine. That is a real thing, though perhaps not as bad as it used to be. If you are buying into the claims that GMOs are carcinogenic or otherwise toxic though, you are wasting your money. The only way any plant can be carcinogenic is if that plant produces carcinogenic compounds, and there is no evidence that any GMO does that, the probability of a GMO doing that without someone spending tons of money to make it do that on purpose is almost nothing, and even if they did, the mandatory and extensive testing required by the FDA would have found problems long before now. The fact is, GMOs are not carcinogenic, and not even one carcinogenic GMO has been produced. Don't waste your money on GMOs for your health, because it won't make any difference. If you want to buy GMOs, do it because you don't want to support unethical companies, because otherwise you are not helping anyone.
(I should add, supposedly there is evidence that glyphosate, the compound used in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide that the Roundup Ready line of GMO crops is used with, may be carcinogenic. This does not make the crops carcinogenic themselves, though trace amounts of herbicide remaining on the crops could be hazardous. It is important to realize that this is still better than the seriously toxic herbicides that were used before Roundup replaced them. The best solution to this potential problem, however, is not to buy non-GMO foods that have probably been covered in those more dangerous herbicides. The best solution is to wash your produce before eating it, something that has been recommended for over a century.)
The start with, what is a GMO? Based on my experience, most lay people believe that a GMO is some kind of molecule or other thing that can be in their food. GMO actually stands for Genetically Modified Organism. An organism is something alive, like a plant, an animal, a bacteria, or pretty much anything else that is alive. When we talk about GMOs in the context of food, we are generally talking about plants. So ,GMO corns does not have GMOs in it, it is a GMO. A GMO is merely an organism that has had its DNA changed in some way. When we talk about GMO plants, we are generally talking about plants that had their DNA changed deliberately and directly by humans, but technically every plant, animal, and other living creature on Earth has arisen from millions of years of natural genetic modification, and a vast majority of the plants and animals that humans eat have had their genes deliberately changed though selective breeding. Every GMO is just a regular organism that has had its DNA changed in some way that could have also happened naturally given the right conditions.
Creating GMOs is a complex process that does something simple. There are several techniques for doing it, but there is one modern technique that is used for making pretty much all GMO food plants. This technique starts by taking a plant with a specific desired trait and experimenting to figure out what gene in that plant causes the desired trait. The most well known trait used in GMOs is resistance to a specific herbicide. Another valuable trait might be more efficient nutrient use, which would be helpful in places with poor soil. Once the gene is isolated, it is removed from the plant and injected into the cells of a plant that genetic engineers want to give the trait. Genes can do a number of different things, but the most well known things genes can do is create proteins. So a gene that makes a plant pesticide resistant might create proteins that break down the molecules of the pesticide before it can damage cells. While it is theoretically possible that a gene from a plant could produce something that is toxic to humans, it is incredibly unlikely if that gene was taken from a plant that does not already product toxins that affect humans.
Now we should make sure we understand what "carcinogenic" actually means. Google defines it as "having the potential to cause cancer." It defines "carcinogen" as "a substance capable of causing cancer in living tissue." Essentially, a carcinogen is a chemical compound or element that can pass into a cell membrane and damage the DNA inside the cell in ways that cause the cell to become cancerous.
So, what about GMOs being carcinogenic? The first think to keep in mind is that technically carcinogens are compounds. Compounds are molecules made up of atoms. There are also a few carcinogenic elements, but they are rare in nature, so you don't generally find them without looking. Nothing larger than a molecule can technically be carcinogenic itself, though we typically refer to objects containing carcinogenic molecules as carcinogenic themselves. Technically though, it is not the tobacco itself that is carcinogenic, but rather it is the nicotine molecules (and a few other things) that are in the plant that are carcinogenic. In theory, we could breed a strain of tobacco without nicotine (and the other things), and it would still be tobacco, but it would not be carcinogenic, because it does not contain any carcinogens.
Now, this brings us to GMOs. The only way we can call GMOs carcinogenic is if they contain carcinogenic molecules. Non-GMO corn does not contain any carcinogens, so it is not carcinogenic. GMO corn cannot be inherently carcinogenic, because the genes we added are not carcinogenic (genes are just short pieces of DNA, and DNA is not carcinogenic, so genes cannot be). What about the plant that we took the genes from, when we made the GMO corn? Honestly, I cannot say, because I don't know what that plant was, but it is very unlikely any company would risk getting fined or shut down for knowingly taking such a risk, and since most plants don't contain carcinogens, it is safe to assume that if plants resistant to a particular herbicide exist, there are probably plenty of non-carcinogenic options. (Keep in mind, these companies want your money, and if you die from cancer because their product is carcinogenic, they are not going to make as much money from you.) Additionally, if a gene that is known to make a plant herbicide resistant is put into a non-carcinogenic plant, even if the original plant did produce carcinogenic compounds, the new GMO plant is extremely unlikely to produce carcinogens, because the genes that caused the original plant to produce them were not put into the new plant. In fact, because most carcinogenic compounds produced by plants are fairly complex molecules, it is almost certain they are produced by a chain of processes, and reproducing the entire chain of processes in another plant would likely require a lot more than just one or two genes. Making a non-carcinogenic plant produce carcinogens using genetic engineering would require deliberately doing lots of very expensive experiments to isolate all of potentially hundreds of genes involved in the process of producing that carcinogen, and there is no reason any for-profit company would spend that much money just to kill off its own customers.
To take this one step further though, there are a few processes that are far more likely to produce carcinogenic plants. The first one produced pretty much every carcinogenic plant known to man, and that process is natural selection. Tobacco was not invented by humans. It evolved the ability to produce nicotine though natural selection (though humans did use selective breeding to increase its nicotine production, but Native Americans were smoking it in religious rituals long before that). The second one, which is linked to natural selection, is radiation exposure, which can "damage" DNA. This damage modifies the DNA in a much less predictable way than modern genetic modification techniques (and was actually used in early genetic engineering study). This could cause a plant to produce carcinogens, but it would likely take hundreds or thousands of specific modification events for this to happen (and this is probably how tobacco evolved the ability to produce nicotine, over millions of years). Given that a vast majority of plants on Earth don't produce carcinogens though (over millions of years of chances), it seems that the probability of millions of years of cosmic radiation resulting in a carcinogenic plant is also incredibly small. Another process that is more likely to create a carcinogenic plant than genetic engineering is selective breeding. Just the process of reproduction is rife with potential error. Genes can get damaged, split and put back together wrong, or just end up with a bad combination. This could create carcinogenic plants from non-carcinogenic plants, but again, after millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of deliberate selective breeding by humans, you would expect to see at least one food crop that produces carcinogens if this was at all likely. So far, the only carcinogenic plants bred by humans appear to be the ones that we deliberately bred to produce carcinogens (like tobacco), and even those seem to have been made carcinogenic by nature long before humans discovered them.
What it comes down to is that GMOs are not inherently carcinogenic, and the modern processes used to make them would require deliberately spending millions of dollars and many years of work to make them carcinogenic. No one with those resources is going to go to that much effort, especially not for-profit companies that have a vested interest in the survival of their customers. Monsanto might be unethical, but they are not stupid.
Lastly, the FDA mandates that all GMOs be carefully tested for carcinogens. They are also tested for other toxic compounds, though those are just as unlikely as carcinogenic compounds if both plants are not already toxic. Note that the FDA does not require this testing for non-GMO plants, including plants produced using selective breeding, which means that there are good odds that GMO plants are actually safer than non-GMO plants.
If you want to stick to buying non-GMO foods because you don't want to support Monsanto and the way they abuse gene patents, fine. That is a real thing, though perhaps not as bad as it used to be. If you are buying into the claims that GMOs are carcinogenic or otherwise toxic though, you are wasting your money. The only way any plant can be carcinogenic is if that plant produces carcinogenic compounds, and there is no evidence that any GMO does that, the probability of a GMO doing that without someone spending tons of money to make it do that on purpose is almost nothing, and even if they did, the mandatory and extensive testing required by the FDA would have found problems long before now. The fact is, GMOs are not carcinogenic, and not even one carcinogenic GMO has been produced. Don't waste your money on GMOs for your health, because it won't make any difference. If you want to buy GMOs, do it because you don't want to support unethical companies, because otherwise you are not helping anyone.
(I should add, supposedly there is evidence that glyphosate, the compound used in Monsanto's Roundup herbicide that the Roundup Ready line of GMO crops is used with, may be carcinogenic. This does not make the crops carcinogenic themselves, though trace amounts of herbicide remaining on the crops could be hazardous. It is important to realize that this is still better than the seriously toxic herbicides that were used before Roundup replaced them. The best solution to this potential problem, however, is not to buy non-GMO foods that have probably been covered in those more dangerous herbicides. The best solution is to wash your produce before eating it, something that has been recommended for over a century.)
26 July 2016
ALM: All Lives Matter
The Black Lives Matter movement targets a very specific problem. That problem is that police officers seem to be rather trigger happy when it comes to interaction with black people. The metrics seem to be very fuzzy, largely due to a lack of any level of reporting or accountability when it comes to police killing people, but the one thing that does seem to stand out is the number of black victims shot by police while completely unarmed. This BLM movement, and the police shootings of innocent black victims, has lead to another problem. Now, people are trying to fight back against the police. Recently we have seen a number of BLM related shootings of police officers. The response to the shooting of a few police officers has been very different from the response of police shooting unarmed and innocent black people though. The media immediately reported it when the police were shot. When the black victims were shot, it was only reported when public outcry reached a threshold where it was starting to go viral. It is as if the media actually cared about the police who got shot but only cared about missing out on a viral story when the black people were shot by police. It is clear that police lives matter, but black lives only seem to matter when it makes a good story. This is a problem, for many reasons, but what it really comes down to is that all lives matter.
I would love to discuss why all of these lives matter, but I am not in the mood for a religious discussion, and the point of this article is to discuss why we seem to treat police lives as mattering more and whether they actually do. Before I start though, I want to stress that regardless of whose life matters more, all human lives are equally valuable.
Why do police lives seem to matter more? Police deaths have always been treated as tragic, especially when those deaths were caused by others. Killing a police officer is considered a greater crime than killing a civilian or even a private security guard. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons. The first is that we tend to revere authority. Police officers have been granted authority by the government beyond what regular civilians are granted. If the government is a legitimate source of authority (and most law abiding citizens will agree that it is, to at least some degree), then police officers have legitimate authority over civilians. Killing a police officer is seen as worse than killing another civilian, because a police officer is part of a higher social class than regular civilians. Aside from a question of the Constitutionality of government mandated social classes (explicit or implicit), we should be questioning this. The reason is that police officers are not appointed leaders. They are law enforcement. Their primary job is our protection. So, without the authority argument, are police lives still worth more than civilian lives? This is a harder question. If they are our protectors, and they get killed, who protects us? On the other hand, if they survive but we get killed, are they really protecting us?
The answer should be obvious. Police officers swear to protect the people they serve. They do this with the understanding that they are putting their own lives at risk by doing it. In short, when a police officer fails to protect an innocent civilian, that police officer has failed. When a police officer is killed while protecting civilians, that police officer has done his or her duty. A police officer that kills an innocent civilian has become part of the problem that he or she has sworn to protect everyone else from. The fact is, police officers are people who have sworn to protect the people with the knowledge that they are risking their lives in doing so. Civilians have made no such commitment. Police officers are like soldiers in this respect. In pure value all lives are equal. When it comes to who's lives matter the most though, those who have committed to protect the lives of others have sworn that the lives of others matter more than their own lives.
All lives matter, but the lives of innocent civilians matter more than the lives of police officers, because those officers have declared it so with their own mouths. When a police officer expressed relief that the murder victim was only a security guard and not a government mandated police officer, that officer violated his or her oath of service. When police arrive a crime scene, and the only death is a police officer, that is when they should be relieved. When police arrive at a scene where innocent civilians have died, they should feel like they have failed their sworn duty, because they have! We should mourn police deaths like we mourn the deaths of soldiers. When soldiers die, we revere them (if we have any sense or gratitude) for the sacrifice they have made for our freedom; we don't get outraged that anyone would dare to kill a soldier. When we express outrage that a police officer was killed in the line of duty, we deny their oath and their sworn purpose, and we raise them above ourselves. Police officers are no better than anyone else, except perhaps in their willingness to risk their lives for our safety. The fact is, black lives matter, and so do white lives, Asian lives, native American lives, and the lives of police officers. The fact also is, police officers have sworn their lives to our protection, and when a civilian dies instead of a police office, we should not feel relief, we should feel ashamed for the officers who did not fulfill their duties. In short, all lives matter, but civilian lives matter more than police officer lives, because police officers have sworn to protect them, with their own lives if necessary.
I would love to discuss why all of these lives matter, but I am not in the mood for a religious discussion, and the point of this article is to discuss why we seem to treat police lives as mattering more and whether they actually do. Before I start though, I want to stress that regardless of whose life matters more, all human lives are equally valuable.
Why do police lives seem to matter more? Police deaths have always been treated as tragic, especially when those deaths were caused by others. Killing a police officer is considered a greater crime than killing a civilian or even a private security guard. Why is this? I can think of a few reasons. The first is that we tend to revere authority. Police officers have been granted authority by the government beyond what regular civilians are granted. If the government is a legitimate source of authority (and most law abiding citizens will agree that it is, to at least some degree), then police officers have legitimate authority over civilians. Killing a police officer is seen as worse than killing another civilian, because a police officer is part of a higher social class than regular civilians. Aside from a question of the Constitutionality of government mandated social classes (explicit or implicit), we should be questioning this. The reason is that police officers are not appointed leaders. They are law enforcement. Their primary job is our protection. So, without the authority argument, are police lives still worth more than civilian lives? This is a harder question. If they are our protectors, and they get killed, who protects us? On the other hand, if they survive but we get killed, are they really protecting us?
The answer should be obvious. Police officers swear to protect the people they serve. They do this with the understanding that they are putting their own lives at risk by doing it. In short, when a police officer fails to protect an innocent civilian, that police officer has failed. When a police officer is killed while protecting civilians, that police officer has done his or her duty. A police officer that kills an innocent civilian has become part of the problem that he or she has sworn to protect everyone else from. The fact is, police officers are people who have sworn to protect the people with the knowledge that they are risking their lives in doing so. Civilians have made no such commitment. Police officers are like soldiers in this respect. In pure value all lives are equal. When it comes to who's lives matter the most though, those who have committed to protect the lives of others have sworn that the lives of others matter more than their own lives.
All lives matter, but the lives of innocent civilians matter more than the lives of police officers, because those officers have declared it so with their own mouths. When a police officer expressed relief that the murder victim was only a security guard and not a government mandated police officer, that officer violated his or her oath of service. When police arrive a crime scene, and the only death is a police officer, that is when they should be relieved. When police arrive at a scene where innocent civilians have died, they should feel like they have failed their sworn duty, because they have! We should mourn police deaths like we mourn the deaths of soldiers. When soldiers die, we revere them (if we have any sense or gratitude) for the sacrifice they have made for our freedom; we don't get outraged that anyone would dare to kill a soldier. When we express outrage that a police officer was killed in the line of duty, we deny their oath and their sworn purpose, and we raise them above ourselves. Police officers are no better than anyone else, except perhaps in their willingness to risk their lives for our safety. The fact is, black lives matter, and so do white lives, Asian lives, native American lives, and the lives of police officers. The fact also is, police officers have sworn their lives to our protection, and when a civilian dies instead of a police office, we should not feel relief, we should feel ashamed for the officers who did not fulfill their duties. In short, all lives matter, but civilian lives matter more than police officer lives, because police officers have sworn to protect them, with their own lives if necessary.
16 July 2016
Shooting Cops
This topic is not one that I expect to be very popular, especially among certain groups, but it is a topic that needs serious discussion before things get worse.
An important question needs to be answered, and that question is, "Is shooting a police officer worse than shooting someone else?" The gut reaction for most people is probably, "Yes!" I want you to think seriously about this though, and specifically ask yourself why. I won't accept an answers like, "It's obvious," or "They deserve more respect." I want to know exactly why shooting a police officer is worse than shooting someone else. If you are struggling with this, you might want to read this article written by a friend who has worked as a security guard and has interacted closely with police in that capacity: http://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2016/07/divide-and-conquer.html.
The fact is, we have a major problem in the U.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids the creation of government mandated social classes. Our current law enforcement system treats the lives of police officers as more valuable than the lives of regular citizens. It gives police officers rights beyond what regular citizens are allowed. It even provides police with access to weapons that are not legal for regular citizens to own. In short, in the U.S. police officers are a de facto aristocracy, given rights and privileges, by the government, beyond what are given to the "peasant" class. Police are not the only aristocracy in the U.S., but they are the only one that is allowed to pass judgement and execute the death penalty without giving the victim a fair trial, which has started to become a serious problem in recent years.
The 2nd amendment is often seen by liberals as purely related to the (possibly outdated) idea that states need armed militias for national protection. Many conservatives see it as a right explicitly given to allow the people to protect themselves against a corrupt government. I have already written on this subject, so I am not going to elaborate, but my conclusion based on the biases and situation of the people who actually drafted and passed the amendment, it is extremely likely that protection against a corrupt government was a very real and serious element (among several others) in the decision to grant the right to bear arms. Now, it should be obvious that the government will never justify the use of this right for the citizens of the U.S. to enforce their Constitutional rights. Any acts against the government, no matter how corrupt it is, will be framed by the government and anyone that benefits from the government (the media, for example) as serious crime. The use of the 2nd amendment by the people to protect themselves from a corrupt government will never be sanctioned by that government, or by the media that has a very close relationship with it. In other words, any violent act by the people to secure their freedom, no matter how necessary, will always get those people branded as villains and criminals.
The only way we can secure our freedom is by thinking for ourselves, instead of letting the government and the media tell us what to think. Now I don't want to glorify violence. No act of violence is ever glorious. Sometimes it is necessary though. I am not going to judge whether the recent violence against police was necessary or not. From one perspective, the police killed were not those guilty of the recent murders committed by police. On the other hand though, they are all part of the same de facto aristocracy, and the American people have a Constitutional right to defend themselves from this kind of government mandated social division. It is time for the people of the U.S. to think for themselves when it comes to this. Instead of taking the word of the media and the government, use your own brains to work out the ethics of a man killing illegally mandated aristocrats who have been given power over him to judge and kill him on the spot, without a fair trial.
I also want to point out something very important. The number of innocent black people murdered by police in the last few years is far greater than the number of police officers killed. Note also that the murders committed by police don't even include the white victims or victims of any other race. The media treats murders of innocent victims by police as controversial, while it treats killings of police as heinous crimes against our great country. This is a country where the citizens are supposed to be the most important thing, but the media and the government treat our police as more important than the citizens. If this does not prompt you to reconsider how you think about the relationship between the government, law enforcement, and the people, then perhaps you live in the wrong country.
I submit that the lives of police officers are worth no more than the lives of any other citizen of this country. I further submit that murders committed by police are a much more serious problem than the occasional police officer killed in the line of duty. Lastly, I submit that the guy who recently killed several police officers had completely reasonable and logical justifications for doing so, though perhaps he could have chosen better targets.
The fact is, we have a major problem here. People with strong morals and good ethics tend to believe that problems like this should be handled through the proper legal channels. It is generally better to campaign and vote for change than to get violent about it. The problem is, the "proper legal channels" are controlled by police through their magical union that has the powers to negotiate laws without the consent of the people. While I will hold out for the proper legal channels for now, this may be a problem that cannot be resolved without violence. It is possible that the shooter was just a hot head with a short fuse. It is also possible that he had better foresight than I do, realizing that the time for the "proper legal channels" has passed. Like I said, I won't pass judgement. I think that it is still possible to fix this without killing a bunch of people. That said, this police aristocracy is so deeply entrenched in our culture and our society that the time may already be here, where the sacrifice of lives is necessary to reestablish our lost freedom and to maintain it once we have gotten it back.
If you have thought seriously about this problem and can clearly see that it is a serious problem, please campaign and vote to fix it. Police should have no more power or value than any regular U.S. citizen. Police should be at least as accountable as regular citizens for any damage, injury, or death that they cause. If we can take police from their elevated position to the same legal and social status as every other U.S. citizen, we can avoid unnecessary blood shed. If we cannot do this though, we are going to have more police shootings and more murders committed by police, and eventually it will end in either open rebellion against the police or a police state so oppressive that we have lost most of the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Either way will involve significant blood shed, possibly for a very long time. The fact is, the U.S. has been a police state for quite a long time. We have let it sneak up on us, and if we don't do something about it now, it will get a lot closer to the movies and books than anyone ever expected.
An important question needs to be answered, and that question is, "Is shooting a police officer worse than shooting someone else?" The gut reaction for most people is probably, "Yes!" I want you to think seriously about this though, and specifically ask yourself why. I won't accept an answers like, "It's obvious," or "They deserve more respect." I want to know exactly why shooting a police officer is worse than shooting someone else. If you are struggling with this, you might want to read this article written by a friend who has worked as a security guard and has interacted closely with police in that capacity: http://bfgalbraith.blogspot.com/2016/07/divide-and-conquer.html.
The fact is, we have a major problem in the U.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids the creation of government mandated social classes. Our current law enforcement system treats the lives of police officers as more valuable than the lives of regular citizens. It gives police officers rights beyond what regular citizens are allowed. It even provides police with access to weapons that are not legal for regular citizens to own. In short, in the U.S. police officers are a de facto aristocracy, given rights and privileges, by the government, beyond what are given to the "peasant" class. Police are not the only aristocracy in the U.S., but they are the only one that is allowed to pass judgement and execute the death penalty without giving the victim a fair trial, which has started to become a serious problem in recent years.
The 2nd amendment is often seen by liberals as purely related to the (possibly outdated) idea that states need armed militias for national protection. Many conservatives see it as a right explicitly given to allow the people to protect themselves against a corrupt government. I have already written on this subject, so I am not going to elaborate, but my conclusion based on the biases and situation of the people who actually drafted and passed the amendment, it is extremely likely that protection against a corrupt government was a very real and serious element (among several others) in the decision to grant the right to bear arms. Now, it should be obvious that the government will never justify the use of this right for the citizens of the U.S. to enforce their Constitutional rights. Any acts against the government, no matter how corrupt it is, will be framed by the government and anyone that benefits from the government (the media, for example) as serious crime. The use of the 2nd amendment by the people to protect themselves from a corrupt government will never be sanctioned by that government, or by the media that has a very close relationship with it. In other words, any violent act by the people to secure their freedom, no matter how necessary, will always get those people branded as villains and criminals.
The only way we can secure our freedom is by thinking for ourselves, instead of letting the government and the media tell us what to think. Now I don't want to glorify violence. No act of violence is ever glorious. Sometimes it is necessary though. I am not going to judge whether the recent violence against police was necessary or not. From one perspective, the police killed were not those guilty of the recent murders committed by police. On the other hand though, they are all part of the same de facto aristocracy, and the American people have a Constitutional right to defend themselves from this kind of government mandated social division. It is time for the people of the U.S. to think for themselves when it comes to this. Instead of taking the word of the media and the government, use your own brains to work out the ethics of a man killing illegally mandated aristocrats who have been given power over him to judge and kill him on the spot, without a fair trial.
I also want to point out something very important. The number of innocent black people murdered by police in the last few years is far greater than the number of police officers killed. Note also that the murders committed by police don't even include the white victims or victims of any other race. The media treats murders of innocent victims by police as controversial, while it treats killings of police as heinous crimes against our great country. This is a country where the citizens are supposed to be the most important thing, but the media and the government treat our police as more important than the citizens. If this does not prompt you to reconsider how you think about the relationship between the government, law enforcement, and the people, then perhaps you live in the wrong country.
I submit that the lives of police officers are worth no more than the lives of any other citizen of this country. I further submit that murders committed by police are a much more serious problem than the occasional police officer killed in the line of duty. Lastly, I submit that the guy who recently killed several police officers had completely reasonable and logical justifications for doing so, though perhaps he could have chosen better targets.
The fact is, we have a major problem here. People with strong morals and good ethics tend to believe that problems like this should be handled through the proper legal channels. It is generally better to campaign and vote for change than to get violent about it. The problem is, the "proper legal channels" are controlled by police through their magical union that has the powers to negotiate laws without the consent of the people. While I will hold out for the proper legal channels for now, this may be a problem that cannot be resolved without violence. It is possible that the shooter was just a hot head with a short fuse. It is also possible that he had better foresight than I do, realizing that the time for the "proper legal channels" has passed. Like I said, I won't pass judgement. I think that it is still possible to fix this without killing a bunch of people. That said, this police aristocracy is so deeply entrenched in our culture and our society that the time may already be here, where the sacrifice of lives is necessary to reestablish our lost freedom and to maintain it once we have gotten it back.
If you have thought seriously about this problem and can clearly see that it is a serious problem, please campaign and vote to fix it. Police should have no more power or value than any regular U.S. citizen. Police should be at least as accountable as regular citizens for any damage, injury, or death that they cause. If we can take police from their elevated position to the same legal and social status as every other U.S. citizen, we can avoid unnecessary blood shed. If we cannot do this though, we are going to have more police shootings and more murders committed by police, and eventually it will end in either open rebellion against the police or a police state so oppressive that we have lost most of the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. Either way will involve significant blood shed, possibly for a very long time. The fact is, the U.S. has been a police state for quite a long time. We have let it sneak up on us, and if we don't do something about it now, it will get a lot closer to the movies and books than anyone ever expected.
02 July 2016
Race and Wealth Distribution
Today, a friend asked me how a more even distribution of wealth could make any difference to people of any specific race. This made me realize that many people legitimately don't understand this, and maybe part of the problem with racial inequity in the U.S. is that a vast majority of people do not even realize that there is a problem. I want to break down the statistics and math so that they are easier to understand, and maybe this will help people to see the issue better.
Pretty much all of this data is in percentages, but this may be a poor way of representing valuable human lives, as it is easy to see percentages as meaningless data that is not associated with actual people. So, I am going to present this as a representative sample of 100 Americans.
If we have a perfectly representative sample of Americans with 100 people in the group, here is what you might expect. In this group, there is one filthy rich person, making at least $450,000 a year. There are 6 regular rich people making over $200,000 a year. There are around 20 upper middle class people, making more than $100,000 a year. There are maybe 36 middle class people making more than $50,000 a year. There are 16 lower middle class and upper lower class people making $30,000 or more a year. There are 21 people in various degrees of poverty. Grouping these a little more broadly, there is one filthy rich person, 6 upper class people, around 72 middle and lower class people, and around 21 people living in poverty.
Now, another way to look at these 100 people is by race. 61 of these 100 people are white. 13 of these people are black. 1 is Native American. 5 are Asian. 17 are Hispanic. The other 3 people are mixed race. White people dramatically outnumber any other specific race, but only a bit over half of the people are white.
This next bit of information, linking the two above data sets, is much harder to find, but we will do our best with what we have. On average, the black people are making $35,000 a year. This puts a vast majority of them into the poverty category, with maybe only one or two in a higher category. White people are averaging $60,000 a year, putting them squarely in the middle of the middle class category, but it is important to understand that the 1 filthy rich guy and the 6 rich people are all white. Yes, there are non-white people in the $200,000+ a year category, but the number is not statistically significant, especially when talking in percentages. The thing to keep in mind here is, there are only 13 black people in our sample. Well under 1% of Americans are both rich and black, or for that matter, rich and any race but white, despite the fact that 39% of Americans are not white. Our 5 Asians are actually the only group to beat white people, at $74,000 a year, but with such a small percentage, we would have to see a lot of Asians making more than $200,000 a year to have a footprint above the middle class, and if that were the case, they would be averaging significantly more than $74,000 a year. Hispanics are making around $41,000 a year, putting them mostly in the high end of the lower class, but again, a lot of them are spread through the poverty section as well as the middle class section. The point here is, if you look at these numbers, you will find that probably 6 or 7 of the black people are in poverty and probably the same number of Hispanic people are there as well. Asians don't make up much of the population, but their mean income is high enough that it would be reasonable to assume most of them are not in poverty, and white people are making up most of the middle and upper class, so most of them are also not in poverty. Broken down, you will probably find that of the 21 people in poverty, around 14 are black or Hispanic, 1 is Native American, and the other 6 are white.
So, here is what this means: About 1/3 of Americans in poverty are black, 1/3 are Hispanic, and 1/3 are white. If the racial distribution of the U.S. was 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 like that, this is what we would expect. This is not the case though. Over 60% of Americans are white, which means that half as many whites are in poverty as the country's racial distribution suggests. In the above breakdown, we have maybe 7 white people in poverty, when we should be seeing more like 13. Only 13% of Americans are black, while around 30% of people in poverty are black. What we are seeing is about twice as many black people in poverty as the numbers suggest. In our breakdown, we have 7 black people in poverty, when we should have only 3. Hispanics are in about the same boat. We are seeing 30% when we should be seeing about half that. In the breakdown, we would be expecting to see about 4 Hispanic people in poverty, while we are actually seeing 7.
So, the numbers have gotten complicated at this point, and honestly there is no way to avoid that entirely. We can still manage though. Here is what we have so far:
Here is what we can see from the above numbers. White Americans are massively over represented in the upper class. They are over represented by 4% in the middle and lower classes. They are massively under represented, by around 28% in the poverty class. Black and Hispanic Americans are massively under represented in the upper class (statistically, there there should be at least one of each). They are under represented by 2% for black people and 3% for Hispanics in the middle and lower class. In the poverty class though, the are massively over represented, by 20% for black people and 16% for Hispanics. In short, we are not seeing enough black and Hispanic people in the upper, middle, and lower classes, and we are seeing way too many in the poverty class. The spots that are left are taken up by white people.
What about redistribution of wealth then? Does this really show that it would help specific races of people? It does, and I will show you how. Consider if we take a significant amount of income from the 7 people at the top. This affects only white people, because that is all there is up there. The middle class won't really be affected much, so a vast majority of white people will actually not be affected at all. The poverty class, on the other hand, has a dramatically different racial distribution, and this is where it makes a difference. If we give the money from the upper class to the 21 people in poverty, we are helping equal numbers of black, Hispanic, and white people, while the national racial distribution is not equal. In fact, breaking down the numbers specifically per race shows the big picture very well.
The number of black people in poverty is close to the same as the number who are not in poverty. So, we are giving more than half of the black population significant amounts of money. The Hispanic population is not quite as evenly divided, but we are still giving 41% of them money. The white people in poverty, however, only make up 10% of the white population. In other words, not only would redistribution of wealth benefit more black and Hispanic people by relative measure (54% of black people and 41% of Hispanics, compared to only 10% of white people), it also benefits black and Hispanic people in larger absolute quantity, because far more of our black and Hispanic populations are in poverty than our white population.
Let's put this into absolute numbers. In 2015 (where most of my data is from), the U.S. population was about 320 million people. According to the racial distribution above, that means we had about 195.2 million white people, 41.6 million black people, and 54.4 million Hispanic people. Out of these numbers, a redistribution of wealth primarily funded by our 7% (or 22.4 million) upper class white people (making more than $200,000 a year, including the 1%, or 3.2 million making more than $450,000 a year) would cost only 22.4 million white people (I say "cost" instead of "hurt" because these people could sacrifice half of the incomes without any real suffering). At the same time, it would help 19.2 million white people, 22.4 million black people, and 22.4 million Hispanic people. The total number of people helped is 67.2 million. The fact is, while only 19.2 million while people would be helped, 44.8 million black and Hispanic people would be helped. In other words, a redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities far more than it would help white people, and it would help almost 3 times as many people as it mildly inconvenienced.
Now, there is another question that goes with this: Would a redistribution of wealth only help the poverty class and maybe the lower class? The evidence seems to indicate that it would not. Research consistently shows that racially diverse schools produce better results for everyone, not just those of minority races. When schools that are exclusively white get some poor black and Hispanic students mixed in (and by "some" I mean, a significant number, not just a token black guy here or there), not only do the poor black and Hispanic students grades improve, the grades of the upper and middle class white students also improve. An effective redistribution of wealth would give black and Hispanic families some of the same mobility as middle and upper class white families, which would give them more choice in what schools to send their children to. We would quickly start to see more black and Hispanic kids in traditionally all middle and upper class white schools, not only helping these minorities to get out of poverty, and also helping the isolated white kids to learn more effectively as well.
It goes further though. While this may not have quite the same level of evidence (the period of time directly after desegregation in the U.S. provided tons of data on school environments and student scores), there is still significant speculation backed by math and some evidence that redistribution of wealth would stimulate the U.S. economy, possibly on a level never before seen in the history of the planet. This could result in the 7% of white upper class Americans ultimately coming away with more than they contributed, and it would certainly help pretty much all of the rest of the people in the U.S.
In short, redistribution of wealth would, at the least, help around 3 times as many people as it costs. It would help the black and Hispanic American populations far more than the white population. It would almost eliminate poverty. It would significantly improve U.S. education, as black and Hispanic Americans take advantage of their new mobility. It would most likely also dramatically improve the U.S. economy, and it might even improve the economy enough to ultimately pay back those who funded it, with interest. (And honestly, even if it didn't, it would not actually hurt anyone, and it would help right some wrongs which have plagued our country for centuries.)
Anyhow, this is how redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities in the U.S. I hope this helps you to see that there is indeed a problem. I hope this helps you to see how redistribution of wealth would help solve this problem. I also hope this helps you see that redistribution of wealth is not just "stealing from the rich to give to the poor," and how it is far more and far better than that. The fact is, the money that would be redistributed should be regarded as compensating people for hundreds of years of theft from them and their ancestors. Overt racism might be illegal, but racism is still causing not only the victims but also the perpetrators a great deal of harm. If we would fix this and right this wrong, our nation could be so much better. As our Pledge of Allegiance says, "United we stand, divided we fall." We might be united as states, but if we are not united as people, our nation will ultimately be crushed under its own weight.
References:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/674703885357867009
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/RHI125215/00
Pretty much all of this data is in percentages, but this may be a poor way of representing valuable human lives, as it is easy to see percentages as meaningless data that is not associated with actual people. So, I am going to present this as a representative sample of 100 Americans.
If we have a perfectly representative sample of Americans with 100 people in the group, here is what you might expect. In this group, there is one filthy rich person, making at least $450,000 a year. There are 6 regular rich people making over $200,000 a year. There are around 20 upper middle class people, making more than $100,000 a year. There are maybe 36 middle class people making more than $50,000 a year. There are 16 lower middle class and upper lower class people making $30,000 or more a year. There are 21 people in various degrees of poverty. Grouping these a little more broadly, there is one filthy rich person, 6 upper class people, around 72 middle and lower class people, and around 21 people living in poverty.
Now, another way to look at these 100 people is by race. 61 of these 100 people are white. 13 of these people are black. 1 is Native American. 5 are Asian. 17 are Hispanic. The other 3 people are mixed race. White people dramatically outnumber any other specific race, but only a bit over half of the people are white.
This next bit of information, linking the two above data sets, is much harder to find, but we will do our best with what we have. On average, the black people are making $35,000 a year. This puts a vast majority of them into the poverty category, with maybe only one or two in a higher category. White people are averaging $60,000 a year, putting them squarely in the middle of the middle class category, but it is important to understand that the 1 filthy rich guy and the 6 rich people are all white. Yes, there are non-white people in the $200,000+ a year category, but the number is not statistically significant, especially when talking in percentages. The thing to keep in mind here is, there are only 13 black people in our sample. Well under 1% of Americans are both rich and black, or for that matter, rich and any race but white, despite the fact that 39% of Americans are not white. Our 5 Asians are actually the only group to beat white people, at $74,000 a year, but with such a small percentage, we would have to see a lot of Asians making more than $200,000 a year to have a footprint above the middle class, and if that were the case, they would be averaging significantly more than $74,000 a year. Hispanics are making around $41,000 a year, putting them mostly in the high end of the lower class, but again, a lot of them are spread through the poverty section as well as the middle class section. The point here is, if you look at these numbers, you will find that probably 6 or 7 of the black people are in poverty and probably the same number of Hispanic people are there as well. Asians don't make up much of the population, but their mean income is high enough that it would be reasonable to assume most of them are not in poverty, and white people are making up most of the middle and upper class, so most of them are also not in poverty. Broken down, you will probably find that of the 21 people in poverty, around 14 are black or Hispanic, 1 is Native American, and the other 6 are white.
So, here is what this means: About 1/3 of Americans in poverty are black, 1/3 are Hispanic, and 1/3 are white. If the racial distribution of the U.S. was 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3 like that, this is what we would expect. This is not the case though. Over 60% of Americans are white, which means that half as many whites are in poverty as the country's racial distribution suggests. In the above breakdown, we have maybe 7 white people in poverty, when we should be seeing more like 13. Only 13% of Americans are black, while around 30% of people in poverty are black. What we are seeing is about twice as many black people in poverty as the numbers suggest. In our breakdown, we have 7 black people in poverty, when we should have only 3. Hispanics are in about the same boat. We are seeing 30% when we should be seeing about half that. In the breakdown, we would be expecting to see about 4 Hispanic people in poverty, while we are actually seeing 7.
So, the numbers have gotten complicated at this point, and honestly there is no way to avoid that entirely. We can still manage though. Here is what we have so far:
- 7 rich or extremely rich people
- 7 White (yes, that is all of them)
- 72 middle and lower class people
- 48 White
- 6 Black
- 10 Hispanic
- 5 Asian
- 21 people in poverty
- 6 White
- 7 Black
- 7 Hispanic
Here is what we can see from the above numbers. White Americans are massively over represented in the upper class. They are over represented by 4% in the middle and lower classes. They are massively under represented, by around 28% in the poverty class. Black and Hispanic Americans are massively under represented in the upper class (statistically, there there should be at least one of each). They are under represented by 2% for black people and 3% for Hispanics in the middle and lower class. In the poverty class though, the are massively over represented, by 20% for black people and 16% for Hispanics. In short, we are not seeing enough black and Hispanic people in the upper, middle, and lower classes, and we are seeing way too many in the poverty class. The spots that are left are taken up by white people.
What about redistribution of wealth then? Does this really show that it would help specific races of people? It does, and I will show you how. Consider if we take a significant amount of income from the 7 people at the top. This affects only white people, because that is all there is up there. The middle class won't really be affected much, so a vast majority of white people will actually not be affected at all. The poverty class, on the other hand, has a dramatically different racial distribution, and this is where it makes a difference. If we give the money from the upper class to the 21 people in poverty, we are helping equal numbers of black, Hispanic, and white people, while the national racial distribution is not equal. In fact, breaking down the numbers specifically per race shows the big picture very well.
The number of black people in poverty is close to the same as the number who are not in poverty. So, we are giving more than half of the black population significant amounts of money. The Hispanic population is not quite as evenly divided, but we are still giving 41% of them money. The white people in poverty, however, only make up 10% of the white population. In other words, not only would redistribution of wealth benefit more black and Hispanic people by relative measure (54% of black people and 41% of Hispanics, compared to only 10% of white people), it also benefits black and Hispanic people in larger absolute quantity, because far more of our black and Hispanic populations are in poverty than our white population.
Let's put this into absolute numbers. In 2015 (where most of my data is from), the U.S. population was about 320 million people. According to the racial distribution above, that means we had about 195.2 million white people, 41.6 million black people, and 54.4 million Hispanic people. Out of these numbers, a redistribution of wealth primarily funded by our 7% (or 22.4 million) upper class white people (making more than $200,000 a year, including the 1%, or 3.2 million making more than $450,000 a year) would cost only 22.4 million white people (I say "cost" instead of "hurt" because these people could sacrifice half of the incomes without any real suffering). At the same time, it would help 19.2 million white people, 22.4 million black people, and 22.4 million Hispanic people. The total number of people helped is 67.2 million. The fact is, while only 19.2 million while people would be helped, 44.8 million black and Hispanic people would be helped. In other words, a redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities far more than it would help white people, and it would help almost 3 times as many people as it mildly inconvenienced.
Now, there is another question that goes with this: Would a redistribution of wealth only help the poverty class and maybe the lower class? The evidence seems to indicate that it would not. Research consistently shows that racially diverse schools produce better results for everyone, not just those of minority races. When schools that are exclusively white get some poor black and Hispanic students mixed in (and by "some" I mean, a significant number, not just a token black guy here or there), not only do the poor black and Hispanic students grades improve, the grades of the upper and middle class white students also improve. An effective redistribution of wealth would give black and Hispanic families some of the same mobility as middle and upper class white families, which would give them more choice in what schools to send their children to. We would quickly start to see more black and Hispanic kids in traditionally all middle and upper class white schools, not only helping these minorities to get out of poverty, and also helping the isolated white kids to learn more effectively as well.
It goes further though. While this may not have quite the same level of evidence (the period of time directly after desegregation in the U.S. provided tons of data on school environments and student scores), there is still significant speculation backed by math and some evidence that redistribution of wealth would stimulate the U.S. economy, possibly on a level never before seen in the history of the planet. This could result in the 7% of white upper class Americans ultimately coming away with more than they contributed, and it would certainly help pretty much all of the rest of the people in the U.S.
In short, redistribution of wealth would, at the least, help around 3 times as many people as it costs. It would help the black and Hispanic American populations far more than the white population. It would almost eliminate poverty. It would significantly improve U.S. education, as black and Hispanic Americans take advantage of their new mobility. It would most likely also dramatically improve the U.S. economy, and it might even improve the economy enough to ultimately pay back those who funded it, with interest. (And honestly, even if it didn't, it would not actually hurt anyone, and it would help right some wrongs which have plagued our country for centuries.)
Anyhow, this is how redistribution of wealth would help racial minorities in the U.S. I hope this helps you to see that there is indeed a problem. I hope this helps you to see how redistribution of wealth would help solve this problem. I also hope this helps you see that redistribution of wealth is not just "stealing from the rich to give to the poor," and how it is far more and far better than that. The fact is, the money that would be redistributed should be regarded as compensating people for hundreds of years of theft from them and their ancestors. Overt racism might be illegal, but racism is still causing not only the victims but also the perpetrators a great deal of harm. If we would fix this and right this wrong, our nation could be so much better. As our Pledge of Allegiance says, "United we stand, divided we fall." We might be united as states, but if we are not united as people, our nation will ultimately be crushed under its own weight.
References:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/674703885357867009
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/RHI125215/00
29 June 2016
Echinacea
I want to clear up some things about echinacea. A few years ago, someone did some scientific research on the claim that echinacea consumption could boost the immune system and make people more resilient to disease. In the study, they found people who were already sick, and they treated them with the herb. They found no benefits to echinacea treatment.
Now, I am not claiming to be an expert on this subject, but my mother and her mother both practice traditional herbalism, and I recall a great many things my mother told me about various herbs, especially echinacea. Before I continue though, I want to make something very clear. At least some traditional herbalism does work. This is not merely ancient witchcraft that is based purely on superstition. There are several plants, when prepared as salves, that do things like increase or decrease blood flow to the area they are applied. There are plants that can be used in poultices and salves that reduce pain. In fact, there are plants that can have effects similar to a great number of pharmaceuticals. Due to lack of scientific research (because most researchers summarily discard herbalism as witch doctor medicine, without any evidence), it is not clear how plant medicines compare to pharmaceuticals, and there is not much information about side effects, but the fact is, there is evidence that many traditional herbalism plants have potentially beneficial effects. In my opinion, we need medical researchers to get off of their high horses and actually do some research in this field, but until they do, we are pretty much stuck with ancient wisdom and simple observation.
Echinacea is supposed to boost the immune system. In more recent times, it is treated as a medicine, but I don't think it was always treated this way. There are a lot of products and various claims out there suggesting that taking echinacea when sick can help you get well faster, but this is not what I was taught, and in fact, I had not even heard of this particular claim until the last 10 or 15 years. What my mother taught me was that echinacea could not be very beneficial for curing an existing disease, because its beneficial effect is not instant. She said that the immune system boosting benefits of echinacea took some time to appear, and that one would have to consume the herb regularly. In other words, she treated the herb as a supplement instead of a drug. Just like consuming vitamin C as soon as you get sick is not going to be of much help, waiting till you are sick to consume echinacea is not going to help either. Vitamin C supplements help the immune system by keeping the body in better shape, not by suddenly making it be in better shape as soon as you take it, and if you have not been getting enough vitamin C, it is necessary to consistently take supplements over a period of time for it to have significant benefits. Again, this is how I was taught echinacea works.
This leads to a serious problem. I don't actually know if echinacea boosts the immune system or not, but there are millions of people who think that the claims that it does are crap, because one study showed that treating it like a medication does not work. Conducting research in this way, and making wide conclusions based on narrow evidence, is dangerous and unethical. The study did not prove that echinacea is ineffective in boosting the immune system. It only proved that taking the herb once already sick is not effective. Now, I said I don't know if the herb is effective or not, but what if it is. What if, in their hubris, these researchers have dismissed a very effective immune system booster, because it did not fit their specific assumptions about how it should work? In the best case, we could be unnecessarily losing a lot of time and money to sickness that could have been avoided. In the worst case, people could be dying because of this.
Here is the way I see it: Perhaps long ago herbalists discovered that people who drank echinacea tea (a common mode of consumption) got sick less often than those who did not. Maybe this was a fluke but maybe not. This knowledge was passed down through generations until modern times. Then, some commercial interest read a line somewhere on the internet saying that echinacea "boosts the immune system," and taking it totally out of context (or perhaps they did this deliberately, just to make their product sound good), used it as an ingredient in a product designed to treat an existing condition. From there, consumers read the labels, which listed the ingredients and mentioned that echinacea boosts the immune system, and these consumers made the same error in assuming it is good for treating disease. From there, some researchers who had not actually done their research on the herb took up the claim and decided to test it, again, taking it completely out of context. Of course they found the claims to be false, because they made some false assumptions about the meaning of the claim. From there, they boasted that they had disproved the claim, saying that echinacea has no immune benefits whatsoever, again missing out on essential context as well as making very wide conclusions from very narrow data. If we applied this same logic to testing vaccines, we would have found that vaccines cannot treat disease long ago, and we would not be using them today.
The fact is, when we test pharmaceuticals, we do rigorous testing. We make sure we test the claims exactly as they are intended, and we also look for side effects. If we find that claims are not met, we don't imply that a drug is not useful for anything. Instead, we discard the specific claims that were made, without making any conclusions about other claims. In short, the research that "proved" echinacea is ineffective for boosting the immune system was poorly conducted and less than rigorous, and it certainly does not meet the standards of pharmaceutical research. Some might say that non-pharmaceutical medicine should not be held to the same standards. This is extremely bad science, especially when comparing pharmaceutical medicine to other medicine. A comparison of any two things that does not hold both things to the same standards is an invalid comparison.
What about echinacea then? Well, the study seems to have proved that it is not a good treatment for disease. It is good that the study proved this, since a number of companies are using this false claim to market ineffective products. The study did not prove that the herb is ineffective for boosting the immune system though, and the fact that it claimed that it did prove this may actually be more damaging than any good it did. Of course, for those that understand this, they can just ignore the unsubstantiated claims, but how many people have been duped by this? If echinacea is effective for boosting the immune system, how much damage is being caused by this false conclusion?
Echinacea has been disproved as a treatment for disease, but the only people claiming that it was a good treatment were for-profit businesses essentially acting as medical quacks (as well as the customers they duped). I think it is important that we test the serious claims, because if the herb really is good for boosting the immune system, we should be taking advantage of that (including the possibility of isolating the active compounds to make better immune boosting pharmaceutical drugs), and if it is not good for boosting the immune system at all, we should be letting the public know, so we can put our resources into more promising things.
What it all comes down to is, there is no reason for modern medicine to demonize the various forms of traditional medicine (except, perhaps greed). This is especially applicable to herbalism, which has given us many useful drugs from morphine to aspirin and a great number of other very valuable pharmaceutical drugs (and yes, some illegal drugs, which we are, ironically, starting to discover have very valuable pharmaceutical value of their own). Attacking and misrepresenting herbalism is dangerous on several levels, one being that we miss out on the opportunity to improve medicine by observing nature, another being that we discourage people from using what might be the best remedy for their condition, and the last being that we cause people who have real knowledge and experience in herbalism to distrust modern medicine. One of the biggest reasons we even have fear of vaccines in our culture, is because people distrust the medical industry, exactly because that industry is attacking their knowledge and beliefs. These people know that the medical industry does not have evidence to back their attacks, and that makes it easy to distrust any evidence claiming that vaccines or other pharmaceuticals are safe. It has been made clear that the medical industry is more interested in profits than anything else, and knowing that makes it easy to believe that they don't care about human safety.
Now, I am not claiming to be an expert on this subject, but my mother and her mother both practice traditional herbalism, and I recall a great many things my mother told me about various herbs, especially echinacea. Before I continue though, I want to make something very clear. At least some traditional herbalism does work. This is not merely ancient witchcraft that is based purely on superstition. There are several plants, when prepared as salves, that do things like increase or decrease blood flow to the area they are applied. There are plants that can be used in poultices and salves that reduce pain. In fact, there are plants that can have effects similar to a great number of pharmaceuticals. Due to lack of scientific research (because most researchers summarily discard herbalism as witch doctor medicine, without any evidence), it is not clear how plant medicines compare to pharmaceuticals, and there is not much information about side effects, but the fact is, there is evidence that many traditional herbalism plants have potentially beneficial effects. In my opinion, we need medical researchers to get off of their high horses and actually do some research in this field, but until they do, we are pretty much stuck with ancient wisdom and simple observation.
Echinacea is supposed to boost the immune system. In more recent times, it is treated as a medicine, but I don't think it was always treated this way. There are a lot of products and various claims out there suggesting that taking echinacea when sick can help you get well faster, but this is not what I was taught, and in fact, I had not even heard of this particular claim until the last 10 or 15 years. What my mother taught me was that echinacea could not be very beneficial for curing an existing disease, because its beneficial effect is not instant. She said that the immune system boosting benefits of echinacea took some time to appear, and that one would have to consume the herb regularly. In other words, she treated the herb as a supplement instead of a drug. Just like consuming vitamin C as soon as you get sick is not going to be of much help, waiting till you are sick to consume echinacea is not going to help either. Vitamin C supplements help the immune system by keeping the body in better shape, not by suddenly making it be in better shape as soon as you take it, and if you have not been getting enough vitamin C, it is necessary to consistently take supplements over a period of time for it to have significant benefits. Again, this is how I was taught echinacea works.
This leads to a serious problem. I don't actually know if echinacea boosts the immune system or not, but there are millions of people who think that the claims that it does are crap, because one study showed that treating it like a medication does not work. Conducting research in this way, and making wide conclusions based on narrow evidence, is dangerous and unethical. The study did not prove that echinacea is ineffective in boosting the immune system. It only proved that taking the herb once already sick is not effective. Now, I said I don't know if the herb is effective or not, but what if it is. What if, in their hubris, these researchers have dismissed a very effective immune system booster, because it did not fit their specific assumptions about how it should work? In the best case, we could be unnecessarily losing a lot of time and money to sickness that could have been avoided. In the worst case, people could be dying because of this.
Here is the way I see it: Perhaps long ago herbalists discovered that people who drank echinacea tea (a common mode of consumption) got sick less often than those who did not. Maybe this was a fluke but maybe not. This knowledge was passed down through generations until modern times. Then, some commercial interest read a line somewhere on the internet saying that echinacea "boosts the immune system," and taking it totally out of context (or perhaps they did this deliberately, just to make their product sound good), used it as an ingredient in a product designed to treat an existing condition. From there, consumers read the labels, which listed the ingredients and mentioned that echinacea boosts the immune system, and these consumers made the same error in assuming it is good for treating disease. From there, some researchers who had not actually done their research on the herb took up the claim and decided to test it, again, taking it completely out of context. Of course they found the claims to be false, because they made some false assumptions about the meaning of the claim. From there, they boasted that they had disproved the claim, saying that echinacea has no immune benefits whatsoever, again missing out on essential context as well as making very wide conclusions from very narrow data. If we applied this same logic to testing vaccines, we would have found that vaccines cannot treat disease long ago, and we would not be using them today.
The fact is, when we test pharmaceuticals, we do rigorous testing. We make sure we test the claims exactly as they are intended, and we also look for side effects. If we find that claims are not met, we don't imply that a drug is not useful for anything. Instead, we discard the specific claims that were made, without making any conclusions about other claims. In short, the research that "proved" echinacea is ineffective for boosting the immune system was poorly conducted and less than rigorous, and it certainly does not meet the standards of pharmaceutical research. Some might say that non-pharmaceutical medicine should not be held to the same standards. This is extremely bad science, especially when comparing pharmaceutical medicine to other medicine. A comparison of any two things that does not hold both things to the same standards is an invalid comparison.
What about echinacea then? Well, the study seems to have proved that it is not a good treatment for disease. It is good that the study proved this, since a number of companies are using this false claim to market ineffective products. The study did not prove that the herb is ineffective for boosting the immune system though, and the fact that it claimed that it did prove this may actually be more damaging than any good it did. Of course, for those that understand this, they can just ignore the unsubstantiated claims, but how many people have been duped by this? If echinacea is effective for boosting the immune system, how much damage is being caused by this false conclusion?
Echinacea has been disproved as a treatment for disease, but the only people claiming that it was a good treatment were for-profit businesses essentially acting as medical quacks (as well as the customers they duped). I think it is important that we test the serious claims, because if the herb really is good for boosting the immune system, we should be taking advantage of that (including the possibility of isolating the active compounds to make better immune boosting pharmaceutical drugs), and if it is not good for boosting the immune system at all, we should be letting the public know, so we can put our resources into more promising things.
What it all comes down to is, there is no reason for modern medicine to demonize the various forms of traditional medicine (except, perhaps greed). This is especially applicable to herbalism, which has given us many useful drugs from morphine to aspirin and a great number of other very valuable pharmaceutical drugs (and yes, some illegal drugs, which we are, ironically, starting to discover have very valuable pharmaceutical value of their own). Attacking and misrepresenting herbalism is dangerous on several levels, one being that we miss out on the opportunity to improve medicine by observing nature, another being that we discourage people from using what might be the best remedy for their condition, and the last being that we cause people who have real knowledge and experience in herbalism to distrust modern medicine. One of the biggest reasons we even have fear of vaccines in our culture, is because people distrust the medical industry, exactly because that industry is attacking their knowledge and beliefs. These people know that the medical industry does not have evidence to back their attacks, and that makes it easy to distrust any evidence claiming that vaccines or other pharmaceuticals are safe. It has been made clear that the medical industry is more interested in profits than anything else, and knowing that makes it easy to believe that they don't care about human safety.
21 June 2016
Is Soylent Really That Great?
Soylent (Rob's Soylent, which is trademarked as Soylent) has a lot of advantages. It is very convenient, especially in the pre-mixed bottled form. It is, theoretically, nutritionally complete (so far as we currently understand nutrition). It is also pretty cheap at $2.50 a meal. Most people cannot see the mistake here. It is true that Soylent is convenient and healthy, but the claim of cheapness is a misguided lie. $2.50 is not actually cheap for a meal.
Consider, I can go to Taco Bell, buy two bean burritos, and spend about that much. That is about as cheap as fast food gets, but this is fast food, not cheap food. Fast food is always expensive. Two bean burritos is about as cheap as you can get for fast food, it is pretty filling, and you are still paying someone else to advertise it, make it, sell it, and serve it to you, which adds quite a lot of overhead.
So, how cheap would Soylent have to be for me to consider it a cheap meal? At $1.50, I could admit that it was approaching cheap. For it to be truly cheap though, it would have to cost $1.00 or less per meal.
I have evidence! First, I have created my own food stamp friendly soylent recipes. I don't recall any of them costing $2.50 a meal, and they are all as nutritionally complete as Rob's Soylent. My soylents have more texture and flavor, which might be off-putting to some, and they are made from real food ingredients (that can all be bought on food stamps). Mixing them is certainly more work, but the prices per meal range from around $2.20 down to $1.50 and possibly a lot less (it has been a while, so I don't recall exact prices anymore though I think the closest I got to a dollar was $1.15). Further, this is not even buying the ingredients in bulk. Industrial bulk rates could at least half the ingredient costs, and while I don't know all of the costs that would go into mass production, I am sure I could beat Rob's Soylent prices by at least 20¢ if not by more than $1.00. This is not all though!
The cheapest way to get food is in bulk, and then make it yourself at home. One of Soylent's true benefits is convenience. The newest versions come premixed and bottled, reducing the work to opening the box and storing the bottles, and then taking out the bottles, shaking them, opening them, and drinking them. You cannot get much more convenient than that (without an IV...)! I cannot beat that with bulk foods, but I can get a lot closer than most people would imagine.
One of the cheapest foods you can get that has decent nutritional value is rice. Enough rice for a meal for one person can be incredibly cheap, and it can even be quite cheap when using more expensive rice. For example, a 25 pound bag of extra long grained rice (about the lowest quality) costs $8.64 at our local Sam's Club. This is about 178 meals worth of rice (a meal is around 0.14 pounds, or 1/3 of a cup of dry rice). This is only 5¢ a meal! This is not very good rice though, and if this stuff is so cheap, maybe you can afford something better, like jasmine rice or basmati rice. Sam's basmati rice is $20.98 for 25 pounds, and while this might seem way more expensive, it still only comes out to 12¢ per meal. Jasmine rice comes out to 6¢ or 10¢ a meal, depending on brand and availability (I have only seen the 10¢ per meal brand at our local club). Fake Japanese rice (Calrose rice, bred and grown in California) comes out to less than 9¢ a meal from Sam's. We recently got a bag of Calrose sushi rice from Winco for less than $30, so even cheaper sushi rice only costs 17¢ per meal, and even though it is not authentic Japanese rice, the Calrose rice and sushi rice both have more flavor than western varieties. Rice is incredibly cheap food! While there are other grains that are even cheaper, rice is one of the best for just cooking and eating whole.
Of course, no one wants to eat just rice for every meal. The Japanese, who have mastered the art of cooking and eating rice, prefer to leave the rice plain and eat it with small amounts of strongly flavored toppings. Traditional toppings include spicy cod roe and natto, a type of fermented soybeans that have such a strong smell that even many Japanese people don't like it (most still eat it for the nutritional benefits). These can be hard to find in the U.S. though, so you can start with some other popular toppings. Some Japanese people season their rice with a sprinkling of salt, and nothing else. Because Japanese rice is more flavorful than western rices, this can be pretty satisfying, though I would not expect anyone to eat it for every meal. A slightly more flavorful topping, called furikake, is a mixture of salt, nori (seaweed) flakes, and sesame seeds, blended a bit, and it often contains other ingredients as well. Sprinkled on top of a bowl of rice, this makes a more flavorful meal than just salted rice, and it is almost as cheap, but again, I think it would get old if eaten constantly. A less popular, but still common topping that might be more palatable to Americans is a small amount flaked (cooked) fish, like tuna (traditionally Ahi or Yellowfin, but canned tuna works as well). Many Japanese people even like to mix this with mayonnaise to make a simple tuna salad, and then they top their rice with just a dollop (traditionally, the topping on Japanese rice is not much more than a tablespoon in size, except with natto, which is served in several tablespoons, and furikake or salt, which is lightly sprinkled). Unless you are buying natto or cod roe from an Asian store in the U.S., the topping typically costs around 10¢ or less, giving you a meal for under 30¢. Even the most expensive topping in the U.S., the cod roe, is unlikely to cost you more than 25¢, unless you use way too much. In any case, for a moderately fancy Japanese every day meal, using inauthentic American grown sushi rice, you can spend well under 50¢ a meal. A single bottle of Soylent, at $2.50, will cost you more than a day and a half worth of this food. That is pretty expensive! Now, I want to talk briefly about convenience. Japanese rice is not as easy to prepare as western rice. It is somewhat more sticky, and if you don't rinse it before cooking, you can end up with a gummy mess. Rinsing is not too difficult. You can get by with a few minutes of sloshing water around with the rice, running your hands through it, and draining and refilling when the water gets milky. Once the rice starts to feel smooth and very little milkiness is coming off into the water, you put the amount of water recommended by your rice cooker in, soak it for 30 minutes to 8+ hours (it is common to soak the rice overnight so it is ready for breakfast), then start the rice cooker. If you prepare 3 meals worth all at once, the rinsing time is not increased much, and you only have to do it once for the day. You could even do more than this, and refrigerate the leftovers, to get several days in at once, if your rice cooker is big enough, and the cooked rice can even be frozen, without losing too much quality. Overall, it is certainly less convenient than Soylent, but it is not that much, and it can be minimized. Most of the toppings either don't need to be prepared or can be prepared in large amounts at once fairly quickly. The tuna salad is the exception, and it is easy enough to mix enough for a whole day in a few minutes (one can of tuna is plenty), or you could mix two days worth and refrigerate it (much more than this and you risk it going bad).
Because Japanese rice is sticky, it is not as suitable for some popular western toppings as western varieties of rice. On average, the western topping will be more expensive and time consuming, but they will also be easier to find. Perhaps one of the most popular rice toppings is curry. Starting with curry powder (instead of a more expensive bottled mix), it is fairly easy to make a cheap curry sauce to go on your rice. There are plenty of recipes online, but a good curry sauce can be made with curry powder, some oil (or heavy cream, if you have it), cumin, salt, and a dash of cayenne (take it easy though, this stuff is powerful). This is cheap to make and adds some great flavor to the rice. In addition, pretty much all spices and herbs are loaded with vitamins and mineral, so this is a pretty healthy meal. By itself, rice does not provide all of the types of protein humans need. One solution is to make a serious curry. There are plenty of curry recipes that include chicken or other meats, and if you keep track of costs and ration the curry, you can keep your meal cheap without sacrificing too much. Keep in mind, you do not need that much protein to survive, and if you diet is already heavy in rice, you are already getting plenty, just not all of the right types. A little bit of meat now and then will take care of this easily. If your curry is going to be too expensive, you can probably half the meat without a problem. Curry is not the only good rice topping. You can make many different kinds of sauce, and if you always go light on the sauce, you can eat quite well, without spending more than $1 a meal. One favorite that I have yet to try is lobster sauce. Yes, you can make a decent lobster sauce on rice for less than $1 per meal. Lobster has a lot of flavor. A lobster tail that costs $16 (our regular local price at this time) can make enough sauce for 50 meals, if you use it right. The first thing you need to do is use it in very small portions, freezing the rest in between. In addition, take some of the shell as well, because the shell contains a lot of the flavor. Boil the meat and the shell together, and keep the water as a stock for your sauce. You can discard the shell at this point. Then you break up the meat fairly small, and make a sauce from the stock. If you make the right amount of sauce for the lobster you used, each meal should cost only 32¢ in lobster, probably around 5¢ for the rest of sauce ingredients, and even with the expensive Jasmine rice, one meal totals 47¢. If you replace the lobster with cheap salad shrimp or something slightly larger, you can easily half that price, if you ration the shrimp right. The thing to keep in mind is that you don't need a lot of the expensive ingredient. You need enough to get the flavor and maybe one or two small pieces per meal. In a pinch, you can tear or even blend the expensive ingredient to more evenly distribute the ingredient and its flavor. Of course, often you don't even need to use an expensive ingredient, and your sauce can cost as little as the rice itself, providing a decent meal for less than 20¢. While western rice is not generally good enough to eat by itself, it is cheaper and it is easier to top. The cost is that preparation time is much more for the topping.
There is one more option, for the epitome of cheapness: Beans and rice. The cheapest rice you can get in 25 pound bags (from Sam's Club, anyhow) costs 5¢ per meal. Buying in small one pound bags, a serving of pinto beans (and you really only need one if you are eating with a meal worth of rice) costs about 15¢. If you buy in bulk (25 pound bag from Sam's), you can expect 4¢ a serving, which is what we will use here. This is a half decent meal for only 9¢! You will need a bit more than this to make it palatable though. We will look at convenience at the same time. Making cheap rice (that does not need rinsed) takes all of 1 minute, depending on the layout of your kitchen. You measure the rice into the cooker, then you add water, then you turn on the cooker. At this point the beans should already be done, because they take a lot longer. Thankfully, they don't take much more work. You will need a crock pot in addition to the rice cooker. The beans are soaked in the crock pot (no heat) overnight. This prepares them for cooking and improves their flavor and texture. In the morning, the water is drained, new water is added along with some seasoning, and the crock pot is turned on. The beans should be ready by evening. The seasonings are what makes beans and rice good. They also make it healthier. Neither beans nor rice contain all of the proteins humans need in their diet, but together they do, which makes them a perfect combination. Add a reasonable variety of spices and herb, and you have a fairly nutritionally complete meal that also tastes good. Of course, the seasonings add to the price, so you are not going to get this for only 9¢, but because seasonings are used in such small amounts, it is not going to add much, unless you are using something like saffron, where the smallest pinch costs several dollars. If you stick to reasonable seasonings, you should spend between 1¢ and 3¢ on flavor, for a maximum price of 12¢ per meal. The only way you can do better than this is buy in larger bulk, and if you know where to look, you can find both rice and beans in 100 pound or larger lots, that will save significant amounts of money, and even seasonings can generally be bought in bulk containers. It is probably possible to get your food prices down to 8¢ or even 6¢ per meal, if you are willing to eat the same food a lot, and if you have enough room to store all of that bulk food.
Soylent is great in lot of ways, but price is certainly not one of those ways. I have demonstrated that we can get our food costs down to 12¢ a meal, using ingredients with known prices. The money for one Soylent meal could provide 20 cheaper meals at these prices (almost a week of food). Even if we allow significantly more flexibility, including the use of "luxury foods" like lobster, the best Soylent can do is the price of 5 of our cheap meals. And, we can be even more flexible, if we note that our serving of beans only cost 4¢, and even if we double that, add two tortillas and a few slices of cheese, we are still well under $1 per meal. Soylent is certainly more convenient than any of our cheap foods (though not much more, in a few cases), it does provide more complete nutrition (though not by a large margin), and it is cheaper than most fast food, but for anyone willing to do the math and eat cheaply, home cooked food can be way cheaper than Soylent, and even without too much additional inconvenience. If Soylent ever gets down to $1 a meal, that's when I will start taking it seriously as a cheap food replacement. As it is, it is way too expensive for me (which does not mean I will not try it when I can afford it)!
Consider, I can go to Taco Bell, buy two bean burritos, and spend about that much. That is about as cheap as fast food gets, but this is fast food, not cheap food. Fast food is always expensive. Two bean burritos is about as cheap as you can get for fast food, it is pretty filling, and you are still paying someone else to advertise it, make it, sell it, and serve it to you, which adds quite a lot of overhead.
So, how cheap would Soylent have to be for me to consider it a cheap meal? At $1.50, I could admit that it was approaching cheap. For it to be truly cheap though, it would have to cost $1.00 or less per meal.
I have evidence! First, I have created my own food stamp friendly soylent recipes. I don't recall any of them costing $2.50 a meal, and they are all as nutritionally complete as Rob's Soylent. My soylents have more texture and flavor, which might be off-putting to some, and they are made from real food ingredients (that can all be bought on food stamps). Mixing them is certainly more work, but the prices per meal range from around $2.20 down to $1.50 and possibly a lot less (it has been a while, so I don't recall exact prices anymore though I think the closest I got to a dollar was $1.15). Further, this is not even buying the ingredients in bulk. Industrial bulk rates could at least half the ingredient costs, and while I don't know all of the costs that would go into mass production, I am sure I could beat Rob's Soylent prices by at least 20¢ if not by more than $1.00. This is not all though!
The cheapest way to get food is in bulk, and then make it yourself at home. One of Soylent's true benefits is convenience. The newest versions come premixed and bottled, reducing the work to opening the box and storing the bottles, and then taking out the bottles, shaking them, opening them, and drinking them. You cannot get much more convenient than that (without an IV...)! I cannot beat that with bulk foods, but I can get a lot closer than most people would imagine.
One of the cheapest foods you can get that has decent nutritional value is rice. Enough rice for a meal for one person can be incredibly cheap, and it can even be quite cheap when using more expensive rice. For example, a 25 pound bag of extra long grained rice (about the lowest quality) costs $8.64 at our local Sam's Club. This is about 178 meals worth of rice (a meal is around 0.14 pounds, or 1/3 of a cup of dry rice). This is only 5¢ a meal! This is not very good rice though, and if this stuff is so cheap, maybe you can afford something better, like jasmine rice or basmati rice. Sam's basmati rice is $20.98 for 25 pounds, and while this might seem way more expensive, it still only comes out to 12¢ per meal. Jasmine rice comes out to 6¢ or 10¢ a meal, depending on brand and availability (I have only seen the 10¢ per meal brand at our local club). Fake Japanese rice (Calrose rice, bred and grown in California) comes out to less than 9¢ a meal from Sam's. We recently got a bag of Calrose sushi rice from Winco for less than $30, so even cheaper sushi rice only costs 17¢ per meal, and even though it is not authentic Japanese rice, the Calrose rice and sushi rice both have more flavor than western varieties. Rice is incredibly cheap food! While there are other grains that are even cheaper, rice is one of the best for just cooking and eating whole.
Of course, no one wants to eat just rice for every meal. The Japanese, who have mastered the art of cooking and eating rice, prefer to leave the rice plain and eat it with small amounts of strongly flavored toppings. Traditional toppings include spicy cod roe and natto, a type of fermented soybeans that have such a strong smell that even many Japanese people don't like it (most still eat it for the nutritional benefits). These can be hard to find in the U.S. though, so you can start with some other popular toppings. Some Japanese people season their rice with a sprinkling of salt, and nothing else. Because Japanese rice is more flavorful than western rices, this can be pretty satisfying, though I would not expect anyone to eat it for every meal. A slightly more flavorful topping, called furikake, is a mixture of salt, nori (seaweed) flakes, and sesame seeds, blended a bit, and it often contains other ingredients as well. Sprinkled on top of a bowl of rice, this makes a more flavorful meal than just salted rice, and it is almost as cheap, but again, I think it would get old if eaten constantly. A less popular, but still common topping that might be more palatable to Americans is a small amount flaked (cooked) fish, like tuna (traditionally Ahi or Yellowfin, but canned tuna works as well). Many Japanese people even like to mix this with mayonnaise to make a simple tuna salad, and then they top their rice with just a dollop (traditionally, the topping on Japanese rice is not much more than a tablespoon in size, except with natto, which is served in several tablespoons, and furikake or salt, which is lightly sprinkled). Unless you are buying natto or cod roe from an Asian store in the U.S., the topping typically costs around 10¢ or less, giving you a meal for under 30¢. Even the most expensive topping in the U.S., the cod roe, is unlikely to cost you more than 25¢, unless you use way too much. In any case, for a moderately fancy Japanese every day meal, using inauthentic American grown sushi rice, you can spend well under 50¢ a meal. A single bottle of Soylent, at $2.50, will cost you more than a day and a half worth of this food. That is pretty expensive! Now, I want to talk briefly about convenience. Japanese rice is not as easy to prepare as western rice. It is somewhat more sticky, and if you don't rinse it before cooking, you can end up with a gummy mess. Rinsing is not too difficult. You can get by with a few minutes of sloshing water around with the rice, running your hands through it, and draining and refilling when the water gets milky. Once the rice starts to feel smooth and very little milkiness is coming off into the water, you put the amount of water recommended by your rice cooker in, soak it for 30 minutes to 8+ hours (it is common to soak the rice overnight so it is ready for breakfast), then start the rice cooker. If you prepare 3 meals worth all at once, the rinsing time is not increased much, and you only have to do it once for the day. You could even do more than this, and refrigerate the leftovers, to get several days in at once, if your rice cooker is big enough, and the cooked rice can even be frozen, without losing too much quality. Overall, it is certainly less convenient than Soylent, but it is not that much, and it can be minimized. Most of the toppings either don't need to be prepared or can be prepared in large amounts at once fairly quickly. The tuna salad is the exception, and it is easy enough to mix enough for a whole day in a few minutes (one can of tuna is plenty), or you could mix two days worth and refrigerate it (much more than this and you risk it going bad).
Because Japanese rice is sticky, it is not as suitable for some popular western toppings as western varieties of rice. On average, the western topping will be more expensive and time consuming, but they will also be easier to find. Perhaps one of the most popular rice toppings is curry. Starting with curry powder (instead of a more expensive bottled mix), it is fairly easy to make a cheap curry sauce to go on your rice. There are plenty of recipes online, but a good curry sauce can be made with curry powder, some oil (or heavy cream, if you have it), cumin, salt, and a dash of cayenne (take it easy though, this stuff is powerful). This is cheap to make and adds some great flavor to the rice. In addition, pretty much all spices and herbs are loaded with vitamins and mineral, so this is a pretty healthy meal. By itself, rice does not provide all of the types of protein humans need. One solution is to make a serious curry. There are plenty of curry recipes that include chicken or other meats, and if you keep track of costs and ration the curry, you can keep your meal cheap without sacrificing too much. Keep in mind, you do not need that much protein to survive, and if you diet is already heavy in rice, you are already getting plenty, just not all of the right types. A little bit of meat now and then will take care of this easily. If your curry is going to be too expensive, you can probably half the meat without a problem. Curry is not the only good rice topping. You can make many different kinds of sauce, and if you always go light on the sauce, you can eat quite well, without spending more than $1 a meal. One favorite that I have yet to try is lobster sauce. Yes, you can make a decent lobster sauce on rice for less than $1 per meal. Lobster has a lot of flavor. A lobster tail that costs $16 (our regular local price at this time) can make enough sauce for 50 meals, if you use it right. The first thing you need to do is use it in very small portions, freezing the rest in between. In addition, take some of the shell as well, because the shell contains a lot of the flavor. Boil the meat and the shell together, and keep the water as a stock for your sauce. You can discard the shell at this point. Then you break up the meat fairly small, and make a sauce from the stock. If you make the right amount of sauce for the lobster you used, each meal should cost only 32¢ in lobster, probably around 5¢ for the rest of sauce ingredients, and even with the expensive Jasmine rice, one meal totals 47¢. If you replace the lobster with cheap salad shrimp or something slightly larger, you can easily half that price, if you ration the shrimp right. The thing to keep in mind is that you don't need a lot of the expensive ingredient. You need enough to get the flavor and maybe one or two small pieces per meal. In a pinch, you can tear or even blend the expensive ingredient to more evenly distribute the ingredient and its flavor. Of course, often you don't even need to use an expensive ingredient, and your sauce can cost as little as the rice itself, providing a decent meal for less than 20¢. While western rice is not generally good enough to eat by itself, it is cheaper and it is easier to top. The cost is that preparation time is much more for the topping.
There is one more option, for the epitome of cheapness: Beans and rice. The cheapest rice you can get in 25 pound bags (from Sam's Club, anyhow) costs 5¢ per meal. Buying in small one pound bags, a serving of pinto beans (and you really only need one if you are eating with a meal worth of rice) costs about 15¢. If you buy in bulk (25 pound bag from Sam's), you can expect 4¢ a serving, which is what we will use here. This is a half decent meal for only 9¢! You will need a bit more than this to make it palatable though. We will look at convenience at the same time. Making cheap rice (that does not need rinsed) takes all of 1 minute, depending on the layout of your kitchen. You measure the rice into the cooker, then you add water, then you turn on the cooker. At this point the beans should already be done, because they take a lot longer. Thankfully, they don't take much more work. You will need a crock pot in addition to the rice cooker. The beans are soaked in the crock pot (no heat) overnight. This prepares them for cooking and improves their flavor and texture. In the morning, the water is drained, new water is added along with some seasoning, and the crock pot is turned on. The beans should be ready by evening. The seasonings are what makes beans and rice good. They also make it healthier. Neither beans nor rice contain all of the proteins humans need in their diet, but together they do, which makes them a perfect combination. Add a reasonable variety of spices and herb, and you have a fairly nutritionally complete meal that also tastes good. Of course, the seasonings add to the price, so you are not going to get this for only 9¢, but because seasonings are used in such small amounts, it is not going to add much, unless you are using something like saffron, where the smallest pinch costs several dollars. If you stick to reasonable seasonings, you should spend between 1¢ and 3¢ on flavor, for a maximum price of 12¢ per meal. The only way you can do better than this is buy in larger bulk, and if you know where to look, you can find both rice and beans in 100 pound or larger lots, that will save significant amounts of money, and even seasonings can generally be bought in bulk containers. It is probably possible to get your food prices down to 8¢ or even 6¢ per meal, if you are willing to eat the same food a lot, and if you have enough room to store all of that bulk food.
Soylent is great in lot of ways, but price is certainly not one of those ways. I have demonstrated that we can get our food costs down to 12¢ a meal, using ingredients with known prices. The money for one Soylent meal could provide 20 cheaper meals at these prices (almost a week of food). Even if we allow significantly more flexibility, including the use of "luxury foods" like lobster, the best Soylent can do is the price of 5 of our cheap meals. And, we can be even more flexible, if we note that our serving of beans only cost 4¢, and even if we double that, add two tortillas and a few slices of cheese, we are still well under $1 per meal. Soylent is certainly more convenient than any of our cheap foods (though not much more, in a few cases), it does provide more complete nutrition (though not by a large margin), and it is cheaper than most fast food, but for anyone willing to do the math and eat cheaply, home cooked food can be way cheaper than Soylent, and even without too much additional inconvenience. If Soylent ever gets down to $1 a meal, that's when I will start taking it seriously as a cheap food replacement. As it is, it is way too expensive for me (which does not mean I will not try it when I can afford it)!
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