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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 09 2019, @02:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the for-how-long dept.

Bloomberg:

Western Europe’s biggest petroleum producer is falling out of love with oil.

To the dismay of the nation’s powerful oil industry and its worker unions, the opposition Labor Party over the weekend decided to withdraw its support for oil exploration offshore the sensitive Lofoten islands in Norway’s Arctic, creating a solid majority in parliament to keep the area off limits for drilling.

The dramatic shift by Norway’s biggest party is a significant blow to the support the oil industry has enjoyed, and could signal that the Scandinavian nation is coming closer to the end of an era that made it one of the world’s most affluent.

How will Norway pay for its social safety network without oil revenues?


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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:59AM (6 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday April 10 2019, @04:59AM (#827290) Journal

    Er, nope. Tabula rasa died 30+ years ago; the problem here is *you* have overcompensated far in the other direction and are attributing far more to evolution and genetics than can be reasonably so attributed. You're also forgetting epigenetics. Do some Googling (or Ducking around on the internet...) for things like "epigenetic effects of famine." These epigenetic effects bridge some, but not all, of the gap that a purely genetic approach misses. They act far faster than gross changes to DNA, as they are merely patterns of expression or silencing of individual genes or gene clusters via methylation or imprinting.

    They still, however, don't get you where you want to go (i.e., to the local Klan meeting). Culture is a stronger force in the short term, and thank goodness for that, else we'd just be a bunch of rock-slinging apes with no fur and weirdly floaty breasts. I'll take technology over raw evolution any day.

    Sorry, but you're not fooling me with this one here. You are, I notice, neatly avoiding specifying what "societal polic[ies]" you want enacted based on your understanding of evolutionary theory vis-a-vis the human race. Why is that? Would you care to expand, in great detail, on these ideas? :)

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:59PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 10 2019, @11:59PM (#827690)

    The rules of evolution in a replicating system with inheritance of characteristics may be statistic, but they are so tautologically correct as to be on par with the laws of thermodynamics.
    Your claim that it doesn't apply to the human mind is like saying "fire is the gaseous oxidation of decomposition products from heated material, except for that one fire over there which is liberating phlogiston".

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:41AM (4 children)

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Thursday April 11 2019, @05:41AM (#827778) Journal

      You don't read so good, do ya, boy? I never said we're exempt from evolution; I said epigenetics is faster than raw sequence change, and culture faster still as well as far more wide-reaching. In fact, culture can become a driver of evolution (Flynn effect, for example).

      It sounds like you just want some sort of "see? the science proves it!" excuse for considering large chunks of the human race inferior, and therefore A-OK to commit genocide against.

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      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @11:47PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 12 2019, @11:47PM (#828793)

        This post demonstrates such a lack of understanding of genetics and evolution that there is no point continuing. I suggest you slowly read and think about "The Selfish Gene" and then follow that up by reading "The Extended Phenotype". Both by Richard Dawkins and are an excellent laypersons introduction to how evolution really works.

        • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 13 2019, @05:46AM (2 children)

          by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday April 13 2019, @05:46AM (#828888) Journal

          > Implying I haven't read these
          > Implying that's germane to the point
          > Implying implications

          Do you just not understand English or what?

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          I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:40AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17 2019, @01:40AM (#830776)

            You may have read them but you obviously didn't understand them. Particularly Extended Phenotype.

            • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:55AM

              by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:55AM (#830859) Journal

              You're never gonna make evolutionary psychology or evolution in general a justification for racism, bro. It's a category error. I don't understand how so many supposedly smart, "rational" people keep falling for this trap. What we choose to do in how we treat others is not an evolutionary issue; we are intelligent beings with moral machinery (though I suspect yours is broken...missing mirror neurons maybe?). Social technology and intelligence are orders of magnitude faster than evolution and can affect things evolution can't, precisely *because* they are under intelligent control and not simply the end result of a quintillion quintillion interactions of molecules and environment.

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              I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...