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Quote from: MrBogosity on May 08, 2013, 01:24:03 PM
I think this is a problem with CGI artists in general: everything moves the way a full-sized human would. The movie 9 and the Toy Story movies seemed to do a much better job of this; the dolls acted as though they were really on that scale.
QuoteAs for the first video: what an idiot. On the one hand, if you take it very generally, that atheist guy[TheAmazingAtheist] is right: money has value because people perceive it to have value (this is true for anything). Value is not derived from labour (as he claims regarding the production of gold). More specifically (he is more specific in his video), he is right to some extent but also makes some elementary mistakes. One ounce of gold is not worth the same everywhere. In fact, gold has value because people perceive it to have value. If people would decide one day that gold does not have any value you would have the same problem with paper money: it would become worthless. And even with a gold standard, there is never enough gold to pay everyone, so there is still a lot of 'virtual' money in circulation.
The big difference between gold and paper money is that the value of gold is to large extent exogenous: that is, gold can be used for many things, like producing computer hardware or jewellery. However, gold prices rise during an economic crises because people buy it not for consumption or production, but to store value. Part of its value (as represented in its price) is therefore due to it being valuable. Paper money has a very low exogenous value (one could use it to wipe one's ass or make paper planes or whatever, but it's not very useful otherwise) and derives most of its worth from being perceived as valuable. That's because (being fiat money) paper money is basically a standardized IOU: when I get $100 pay, it gives me the claim on goods worth $100, so I can go to a bakery and buy a loaf of bread. The baker accepts the payment because he is legally obliged to do so, but also because it's a beneficial exchange: he has more bread than he needs for himself, and he can use the money he gets to buy other stuff in return. The money has value because people perceive it to have value, and the obligation to accept it means people keep perceiving it as valuable, because it ensures its usefulness and thus its value. Paper money is not actually different from gold or money backed by gold. The production of paper money still requires labour an capital, like gold, and has some exogenous value. The difference is rather in differences within these characteristics. Paper is ill suited as money, because of its low value (which, again depends ultimately on its use), so it would not be any better than simply bartering. (Bartering is in fact what we still do, the process has simply become much simpler because there is now a good universally accepted as valuable, and which is equally valuable to everyone).
EDIT: WTF, this guy is in favour of insider trading? That is pretty fucking retarded. In fact, it's one of the very few things which everybody agrees on is a bad thing: economists, politicians, citizens... That's because there is not a single reason for insider trading.
Long story shirt: read a good textbook if you're interested in economics, don't watch these videos which give a completely wrong impression.
QuoteNP theory reveals that Eurasian Neanderthals hunted, killed and cannibalised early humans for 50,000 years in an area of the Middle East known as the Mediterranean Levant (see map, right).
Because the two species were sexually compatible, Eurasian Neanderthals also abducted and raped human females.
Them and Us cites new evidence from archaeology and genetics to demonstrate that this prolonged period of cannibalistic and sexual predation began about 100,000 years ago and that by 50,000 years ago, the human population in the Levant was reduced to as few as 50 individuals.
The death toll from Neanderthal predation generated the selection pressure that transformed the tiny survivor population of early humans into modern humans.
This Levantine group became the founding population of all humans living today.
NP theory argues that modern human physiology, sexuality, aggression, propensity for inter-group violence and human nature all emerged as a direct consequence of systematic long-term dietary and sexual predation by Eurasian Neanderthals.
Vendramini's discovery of the traumatic secret history of our ancestors resolves the last great mysteries of our species - how, why, when and where we became human beings.
It is unquestionable the biggest shake-up in evolutionary theory since Darwin.