If only we knew exactly what in the culture we need to fix. There are a lot of theories. Something in our environment has broken the homeostasis which worked for the last million years.
Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.
I'm not sure there is a mainstream American right. There are several threads that appear to have incompatible ideas. Then the politicians try to give lip-service to all of them, which makes it impossible to actually deliver on any of their promises without pissing off the rest of their supporters.
I think there did used to be a main-stream of conservative thought, from Buckley through Reagan. But they are just one of the threads, now.
1. Most or all of the mummies studied were from neolithic societies, not paleolithic. The only one that might be considered paleolithic is the Unangan, but even these are from decades after they were conquered by the Russians. So they may very well have had white flour and processed sugar in their diet. I couldn't find information about their diet during this period.
2. The time needed for natural selection to work. I'm not convinced by this one. The examples that were given would have had higher selection pressure on the young during their child-bearing years. I would guess that the selection pressure from diseases of old-age would be much less, and would take many more generations to be felt.
Still some good points to be made about the naturalistic fallacy.
Not entirely market forces. City zoning often requires housing over there, shopping way the hell over that way, and your work miles away in a different direction. Which means that you have to drive to go anywhere. So everything is built to move cars around as quickly as possible, at the expense of making walking so unpleasant that nobody wants to go out there. There are a lot of intertwining forces here that have nothing to do with the market.
Well, for one thing, the school is an arm of government, not a private party. We allow private parties to do all sorts of things we don't allow governments to do.
I think some of that is generational. The women I work with who are my generation (I'm in my 50s) find that offensive, whereas the ones from the generation younger don't see anything wrong with it. I think the language is changing, where the previous generation would say men and girls, and my generation would say men and women, the next generation seems to be moving toward girls and boys.
Just a short note of clarification about the GPL: The intent is to protect the freedom of the users, not the developers. Essentially so that every user can potentially be a developer, too.
The non-driver issue is a big one. I believe I have read that typically on third of the population don't drive, either because they are too young, too old, or have some sort of disability. This doesn't include those who are poor enough that keeping a car is a major expense.
The ways we have used zoning (minimum lot sizes and setbacks, and putting housing over here and work and shopping way the hell over there), and engineering our roads to make automobiling as quick as possible, has disenfranchised a large part of our population.
You can't go back. 2007-era Google would be unusable with all the SEO-hacks that people have discovered since then. Google has to keep tuning their algorithms to stay ahead of the "optimizers" and spammers.
> The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.
You seem to be trying to imply a cause and effect relationship here, without actually saying that. I'm sure we can find examples of rich countries with small governments, and poor countries with large governments.
Also, for rich countries with large governments, which came first? Did they become rich, then grow large governments, or did they get a large government, and then become rich? I would guess that the former is more typical than the latter.