To add to this, the periods of exponential population growth tend to come as infant mortality decreases. It takes a while for the population to adjust to the new infant mortality rate (by having fewer kids) since the commonly accepted mortality rate lags the actual mortality rate. This is in contrast to the west, where we are used to low infant mortality, so populations are much more stable. Once the developing world adjusts to the new much lower mortality rate, there's a period of linear population increase as the excess babies grow and have more modest numbers of kids and grandkids of their own. In addition to that there are still second order effects, like increased life span. The last projection I heard from an expert was 11 billion humans before it roughly stabilises worldwide. The effect of eliminating these mosquitoes would likely be an increase of population for a few generations only and it could still be counteracted through other means.
Yeah, they don't mean official cause of death, they mean cases where removing alcohol from the equation would have prevented death.
In your DUI example, if the driver wasn't drunk, then he'd have a low probability of crashing so there's a high probability it's a 'cause' by this definition. If instead we remove the car from the equation, then it'd just be drunken fool sat on the ground, steering an imaginary wheel, making car noises, so the car is a 'cause' as well by this definition. His limbs are also a cause. If we'd cut them off, then he'd not have been able to drive, and so on.
Rather than argue in favour of mutilation, etc., they've decided drinking responsibly is a solution to enough problems that it's worth highlighting, and they've chosen to do so with a relaxed attitude toward the meanings of words and phrases.
My original post in this thread was about controlling the population pyramid. I already pointed out the value in population control after retirement in this first post. The rest of our discussion came from my concern that twenty-something is too early to die because it hurts the population pyramid, being a productive age with many productive years still head.
i'm not saying paying for it bothers me. I'm answering the question 'Why blame alcohol?' If the question was 'Why blame free will?', I'd have given a different answer. To do this I looked at it from the point of view of those who are in a position to effect change. Higher alcohol taxes deter heavy drinking and are easy to implement. They also mean lower taxes elsewhere or more money to spend elsewhere. It's easier, cheaper and less effort for a government to do this than run education programs or advertising campaigns. If we make alcohol the villain, it's easier to spin higher taxes on alcohol. This is a reason to blame alcohol for anyone who supports this approach to the problem.
I agree with this however it does not address my point. The comparison I am making is between a world with and without alcohol abuse. Call them A and B respectively. Consider in both cases the 'age of death' distribution. In A, there is a higher proportion dying for those in their 20s compared to B. For clarity, I am not making a comparison between A and C, a world where the other diseases do not exist, since this is the wrong base rate. We get the result in part because alcohol is less of an 'old people cause of death' than competing causes of death. I could make the same point with 'death by unbiased lottery'. Since it does not discriminate by age like most fatal diseases, it would be a poor means of population control compared to the existing population control. As before I'm using the word 'poor' with regard to economic prosperity not morality.
If we blame alcohol, we can raise the taxes on it. If we blame their behaviour then what can we do? Trying to change their behaviour costs the tax payer money whereas raising taxes on alcoholic drinks brings in tax revenue.
I don't doubt this is a major factor but it doesn't invalidate the point. The base rate for death is senescence related and we should compare to the base rate.
It's a poor mechanism for population control. It kills those in their 20s disproportionately often. This means the resources used to raise and educate these people are wasted since they died before they could make a sufficient contribution. A more cost efficient mechanism would target those past retirement or the very young or ideally prevent conception in the first place. As others have pointed out, alcohol may even increase the number of unplanned pregnancies, making the overpopulation problem worse.
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster.
Planet earth heating up faster means the planet is absorbing more heat energy than it radiates outward. The glaciers are part of planet earth. If they absorb heat energy, then this is contributing to the earth heating faster, not preventing it. It's also one of the worst places on the globe for the heat to go because a rise in sea level would be expensive if it got out of hand.
I've seen some of these embarrassing "debates" on trashy day time TV before. It's like watching two people speaking different languages to each other and getting nowhere. Essentially they playing different games with different rules. On the academic side they demand sound logic and an intellectually honest approach to evidence, etc. and this is how you win. On the other side this counts for nothing because it's not understood. To gain followers amongst this crowd it's about speaking with confidence and passion with the right amount of repetition to be remembered. Its about making the message easy to understand with the right buzzwords that stick in the mind. It's about making the audience want to believe you because it feels good to them. Academics credit all this with zero value however. This means both sides can come away thinking they've won the debate despite converting nobody. To convert someone, you need to understand it from their point of view and learn the rules of their game.
Take Genesis: It has the lie of omission about Adam's first wife,
Genesis didn't have a member named Adam. You mean Phil Collins?
has contradictory creation stories (Man is created _after_ the animals in chapter 1, but _before_ the animals in chapter 2
So he made at least two worlds trying out different orders of creation. Where's the contradiction? If anything this makes it more plausible because it explains why we don't see Spiderman in this world. (He's in the other one).
has the nonsense of day & night existing BEFORE the sun was made,
The sun only comes out during the day because it's scared of the dark. I thought everyone knew that, jeez.
Chapter 4:4 shows that there were humans BEFORE Adam, etc.
Go on any star wars fan site, and they'll all agree the original trilogy is canon. This happened A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Obviously Luke Skywalker came before Adam, so this just confirms both the Torah and the Star Wars trilogy.
I could go on but I think it's clear all your concerns can easily be resolved by saying whatever nonsense comes into my head. This awfully stringent requirement that your worldview must make sense is like shackles upon you. Like so many slashdot users you have learnt to accept the shackles and love your captor like some sort of twisted figurative stockholm syndrome. Only when you rid yourself of these shackles are you truly free! Remember ignorance is bliss, and why would you not want bliss? Follow me and I give you ultimate freedom and ultimate bliss. We can talk about tithing later.
What's your point here exactly? You've demonstrated that being female is not a sufficient condition for the job, but so what? Being female is not a sufficient condition for any job, regardless of the employer's gender bias. It's discrimination if being female is a necessary condition for employment. This is the case with surrogacy for obvious reasons. This confirms the above claim that there exist roles for which gender discrimination is appropriate where it is "paramount to the job".
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
Light takes many routes through the glass, bouncing off the many obstacles. What your eye sees is the route of maximal constructive interference. If you remove the sides of the glass, then the interference pattern is not the same. As far as you know, I'm just a random guy on the internet of course, so do double check everything I just said.
I looked up ownership up in the dictionary and it said, "the state, relation, or fact of being an owner". This did not help me much so I looked up the definition of 'owner'. It said a "person who owns something". I looked up 'own' and it said "to have as property". I looked up 'property' and it said "something owned".
Well none of this was enlightening so I looked up possession and law and it turns out possession is "nine tenths of the law". Well, I'm sure as hell not reading nine tenths of the law. It'd take me ages. As much as I'd like to help, I can't because I don't know what ownership means...
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To add to this, the periods of exponential population growth tend to come as infant mortality decreases. It takes a while for the population to adjust to the new infant mortality rate (by having fewer kids) since the commonly accepted mortality rate lags the actual mortality rate. This is in contrast to the west, where we are used to low infant mortality, so populations are much more stable. Once the developing world adjusts to the new much lower mortality rate, there's a period of linear population increase as the excess babies grow and have more modest numbers of kids and grandkids of their own. In addition to that there are still second order effects, like increased life span. The last projection I heard from an expert was 11 billion humans before it roughly stabilises worldwide. The effect of eliminating these mosquitoes would likely be an increase of population for a few generations only and it could still be counteracted through other means.
Yeah, they don't mean official cause of death, they mean cases where removing alcohol from the equation would have prevented death.
In your DUI example, if the driver wasn't drunk, then he'd have a low probability of crashing so there's a high probability it's a 'cause' by this definition. If instead we remove the car from the equation, then it'd just be drunken fool sat on the ground, steering an imaginary wheel, making car noises, so the car is a 'cause' as well by this definition. His limbs are also a cause. If we'd cut them off, then he'd not have been able to drive, and so on.
Rather than argue in favour of mutilation, etc., they've decided drinking responsibly is a solution to enough problems that it's worth highlighting, and they've chosen to do so with a relaxed attitude toward the meanings of words and phrases.
My original post in this thread was about controlling the population pyramid. I already pointed out the value in population control after retirement in this first post. The rest of our discussion came from my concern that twenty-something is too early to die because it hurts the population pyramid, being a productive age with many productive years still head.
i'm not saying paying for it bothers me. I'm answering the question 'Why blame alcohol?' If the question was 'Why blame free will?', I'd have given a different answer. To do this I looked at it from the point of view of those who are in a position to effect change. Higher alcohol taxes deter heavy drinking and are easy to implement. They also mean lower taxes elsewhere or more money to spend elsewhere. It's easier, cheaper and less effort for a government to do this than run education programs or advertising campaigns. If we make alcohol the villain, it's easier to spin higher taxes on alcohol. This is a reason to blame alcohol for anyone who supports this approach to the problem.
I agree with this however it does not address my point. The comparison I am making is between a world with and without alcohol abuse. Call them A and B respectively. Consider in both cases the 'age of death' distribution. In A, there is a higher proportion dying for those in their 20s compared to B. For clarity, I am not making a comparison between A and C, a world where the other diseases do not exist, since this is the wrong base rate. We get the result in part because alcohol is less of an 'old people cause of death' than competing causes of death. I could make the same point with 'death by unbiased lottery'. Since it does not discriminate by age like most fatal diseases, it would be a poor means of population control compared to the existing population control. As before I'm using the word 'poor' with regard to economic prosperity not morality.
If we blame alcohol, we can raise the taxes on it. If we blame their behaviour then what can we do? Trying to change their behaviour costs the tax payer money whereas raising taxes on alcoholic drinks brings in tax revenue.
I don't doubt this is a major factor but it doesn't invalidate the point. The base rate for death is senescence related and we should compare to the base rate.
It's a poor mechanism for population control. It kills those in their 20s disproportionately often. This means the resources used to raise and educate these people are wasted since they died before they could make a sufficient contribution. A more cost efficient mechanism would target those past retirement or the very young or ideally prevent conception in the first place. As others have pointed out, alcohol may even increase the number of unplanned pregnancies, making the overpopulation problem worse.
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster.
Planet earth heating up faster means the planet is absorbing more heat energy than it radiates outward. The glaciers are part of planet earth. If they absorb heat energy, then this is contributing to the earth heating faster, not preventing it. It's also one of the worst places on the globe for the heat to go because a rise in sea level would be expensive if it got out of hand.
And Ozzy Osbourne eats bats, so he is consuming plastic too. Nobody eat Ozzy Osbourne, or you're just making the problem worse.
I've seen some of these embarrassing "debates" on trashy day time TV before. It's like watching two people speaking different languages to each other and getting nowhere. Essentially they playing different games with different rules. On the academic side they demand sound logic and an intellectually honest approach to evidence, etc. and this is how you win. On the other side this counts for nothing because it's not understood. To gain followers amongst this crowd it's about speaking with confidence and passion with the right amount of repetition to be remembered. Its about making the message easy to understand with the right buzzwords that stick in the mind. It's about making the audience want to believe you because it feels good to them. Academics credit all this with zero value however. This means both sides can come away thinking they've won the debate despite converting nobody. To convert someone, you need to understand it from their point of view and learn the rules of their game.
The Torah is NOT a history book.
That's right, it's five books!
Take Genesis: It has the lie of omission about Adam's first wife,
Genesis didn't have a member named Adam. You mean Phil Collins?
has contradictory creation stories (Man is created _after_ the animals in chapter 1, but _before_ the animals in chapter 2
So he made at least two worlds trying out different orders of creation. Where's the contradiction? If anything this makes it more plausible because it explains why we don't see Spiderman in this world. (He's in the other one).
has the nonsense of day & night existing BEFORE the sun was made,
The sun only comes out during the day because it's scared of the dark. I thought everyone knew that, jeez.
Chapter 4:4 shows that there were humans BEFORE Adam, etc.
Go on any star wars fan site, and they'll all agree the original trilogy is canon. This happened A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Obviously Luke Skywalker came before Adam, so this just confirms both the Torah and the Star Wars trilogy.
I could go on but I think it's clear all your concerns can easily be resolved by saying whatever nonsense comes into my head. This awfully stringent requirement that your worldview must make sense is like shackles upon you. Like so many slashdot users you have learnt to accept the shackles and love your captor like some sort of twisted figurative stockholm syndrome. Only when you rid yourself of these shackles are you truly free! Remember ignorance is bliss, and why would you not want bliss? Follow me and I give you ultimate freedom and ultimate bliss. We can talk about tithing later.
Look up Bell's theorem.
I just looked this up and gravity actually cost more on dvd than blu-ray for some reason. Not sure why.
What's your point here exactly? You've demonstrated that being female is not a sufficient condition for the job, but so what? Being female is not a sufficient condition for any job, regardless of the employer's gender bias. It's discrimination if being female is a necessary condition for employment. This is the case with surrogacy for obvious reasons. This confirms the above claim that there exist roles for which gender discrimination is appropriate where it is "paramount to the job".
That'll be why Kevin Spacey treasures his awards then...
Or like if you apply for a job as a surrogate mother but happen to be male?
It's because normally they live in sewers learning ninja from mutant rats.
Did he say that though? That's right I'm quite literally doubting Thomas.
Political correctness is following somebody else's guidelines for what is acceptable speech. As a result it can come across as insincere. The speaker may even resent being coerced into speaking that way. Politeness comes from the individual and so comes across as more heartfelt and sincere.
Rather than getting to the root of the problem, political correctness simply encourages people to mask their real views until an opportunity to vote in somebody who shares their disdain for political correctness comes along. The more they feel their free speech has been trampled upon, the more keen they'll be to vote this way.
Well thatth thertainly offenthive!
Light takes many routes through the glass, bouncing off the many obstacles. What your eye sees is the route of maximal constructive interference. If you remove the sides of the glass, then the interference pattern is not the same. As far as you know, I'm just a random guy on the internet of course, so do double check everything I just said.
So if I hold somebody's hand, they're my slave?
They're a waste of energy.
I looked up ownership up in the dictionary and it said, "the state, relation, or fact of being an owner". This did not help me much so I looked up the definition of 'owner'. It said a "person who owns something". I looked up 'own' and it said "to have as property". I looked up 'property' and it said "something owned".
Well none of this was enlightening so I looked up possession and law and it turns out possession is "nine tenths of the law". Well, I'm sure as hell not reading nine tenths of the law. It'd take me ages. As much as I'd like to help, I can't because I don't know what ownership means...