No, it's a dollar that the government has to raise through other tax measures, such as the tax rate you pay (if you are an american citizen), or that the local companies in your area have to pay since they can't offshore their businesses and take advantage of these loopholes.
You know, maybe they get together so that they can be with like minded individuals who they have something in common with. Perhaps they want a break from socialising with people who frequently treat them like second class citizens and despise them for their lack of faith and constantly tell them that they are going to hell.
1. How does science explain where the material for the big bang came from and why it was there? Where's the scientific explanation of the material's origin, I would love to hear it... science only goes so far no matter HOW MUCH of it you accept
As far as I know, science does not yet have a solid theory for how this came about. There are some interesting hypothesises, for example one is that that the universe actually has a net zero energy state. The energy in the matter is balanced by negative gravitational energy - see this article. Of course this is just one hypothesis, there are others. However, just because we don't yet have a complete answer for the origin of the universe doesn't mean that it's acceptable to say "god did it".
Also the origin of the universe has nothing to do with evolution as taught in school and college. The origin of the universe is more properly part of cosmology and physics. Evolution is biology and ONLY deals with how organisms change over time, it doesn't even address how life might have come about in the first place. So if the argument is that we shouldn't teach evolution because science does not yet have a theory about the origin of the universe, you might as well say that we shouldn't teach ANY science at all. Should we not teach chemistry because we don't know where the matter came from, should we ignore physics as well?
So while it's true that science only goes so far as you say that is still not an excuse for not teaching it. Science it can only address topics where, by definition, the scientific method can be applied. Religions' claims are, again by definition, not scientific. One cannot apply the scientific method to supernatural claims - since no hypothesis can be tested; a god could always use its supernatural power to ensure any result it wanted.
2. How did the reproductive system evolve? If the theory of evolution is that mutations that help an organism survive are what get selected, none of the system in either gender existed at the outset, most if not all of it needs to be present in order for it to work, and without it working there is no survival advantage, how did it evolve? Was it just 1,000 random mutations all happening at exactly the same time?
Your first misunderstanding is that the reproductive system needs all of it's current complexity to give an advantage. Being able to combine DNA without having different sexes gives a huge advantage in terms of natural selection, and then once you have that then selection pressure will evolve fitter and fitter mechanism until one has the full complexity that we see today. The system evolved in very very gradual steps. If you are thinking that sexual reproduction is an example of irreducible complexity, then I suggest that you do a little bit of research into it. For example, a quick look at Wikipedia provides a useful starting point for the layman.
I am not really religious. But I will discount all theories of some other being having a hand in creating us when science has a full and fully defensible explanation
So if you discount all theories until there is full and fully defensible explanation, then I guess you discount gravity. That can't be useful at all since we don't yet have a full explanation. Oh wait, yes it's still useful to use Newton's equations even though they've been superseded by Einstein's, and it's useful to use Einstein's even though they don't work so well at the quantum level.
White people did "evolve" from black people as you say, however your complete misconception appears to be that evolution means "better", i.e. that white people are better that black people. Yes white people are "fitter" for an environment that it far from the equator. However, black people are "fitter" for an equatorial environment. That's it, that's the only conclusion that you can draw, nothing about any other traits. One cannot draw any conclusion about which is "best" from this evidence - except that black people are "better" for equatorial regions and white people are "better" for non-equatorial regions.
Also don't forget that the black population that remained near the equator also continued to evolve based on fitness for their environment, just as the population who moved away from the equator evolved paler skin based on fitness for their non-equatorial environment.
After years of work I came to the same conclusion the vast majority of Philosophers have, which is that there is probably a creator.
Strange, so a "vast majority" is about 15% right? This 2009 survey shows that 72% of philosophers from major academic institutions lean towards atheism as opposed to the only 15% who lean towards theism.
i simply fail to see how the wholesale swallowing of something as ill-proven and flimsy as evolution does us a whole lot of good today? it doesn't push forward science. it doesn't find the higgs-boson, nor does it enhance quantum-theory. it simply provides something to believe about the origins of the universe if you choose not to believe in a God-created world.
Evolution is a proven fact. There is a huge amounts of evidence, for example DNA. Evolution is the fundamental basis of all of biology and medicine, so you say "it doesn't push forward science", I guess you don't consider the medical breakthroughs that save millions of lives every year as worthwhile or pushing science forward?
the humor here is that evolutionists used to be the skeptics, in a largely God-believing world (however ill-informed). now, we believers are skeptical; we see the leaps of faith required to believe evolution... and the student once again becomes the master. we now get to be the skeptics.
sorry, bill. i'm not buying it. prove it, or accept that it is a theory.
You seem to think that a scientific theory means it's just a guess. A scientific theory is the 'gold standard' of science. The theory of evolution through natural selection (that's the theory not evolution itself, which is an observed fact), is the theory that best fits the huge amount of a facts and evidence that science has collected over the centuries.
I see no scepticism in "believers". They rely on faith rather then evidence for their beliefs, which is pretty much the antonym of scepticism.
There is no way that anyone can prove or disprove what happened to Jesus (assuming an historical Jesus existed), and even if there were incontrovertible evidence that Jesus did exist and was crucified and was seen alive a couple of days later that would still not prove that it was a supernatural event.
For example, which is more likely, that a god brought him back to life, or that he was not actually dead.
Now, let's say that he did actually die (by their definition at the time) and his heart had stopped. We now know that people can be resuscitated from that condition and we don't consider it a supernatural miracle. It's perhaps unlikely that it could have happened in the first century, but unlikely is not impossible and it is much more probable than a supernatural cause.
Finally, Let's say that his heart stopped and he was brain dead. If he then recovered, it would still not be evidence of a supernatural cause. It would be evidence that something had happened that we don't yet understand. It might well be that in certain circumstances there is a natural process by which someone in this state can be resuscitated. We have no evidence that this can happen, but lack of evidence is not a evidence that it is impossible.
Of course the real question is why you'd be trading in Hong Kong from the US when you can co-locate your servers in Hong Kong and run your trading algorithms there.
Why try and save yourself 100ms latency by going through the centre of the earth with neutrinos when you can save all 150ms by putting your computers in the same data centre as the exchange itself! After all you're not going to have a human at the end of the data feed making decisions if you're worried about shaving off milliseconds, it's computers making those decisions based on parameters that humans set. And even if your were, you'd have those humans sitting in Hong Kong.
Except in Marks and Spencer where all prices are to the whole pound.
To me that always seem more honest and it saves them having to have a lot of pennies in their tills. They just need notes and pound coins.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 2
At least in the UK, the government are wise to that dodge. VAT is charged on the value of the goods or services transferred regardless of the actual price paid. They would certainly look at the car and see that you are selling it for $1, they would adjudicate that it was worth say $50,000 and charge VAT on that value rather than the $1. Most people don't realise this since for the vast majority of the time the price and value are deemed to be the same.
(This is ignoring a single sale between two individuals for which VAT is not applicable, however once you start doing a lot of sales to private individuals you are deemed to be trader and therefore liable for VAT registration).
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
The US government might not earn tax on it, however the Danish or French governments would. He could buy from a country which doesn't have a sales tax on luxury yachts but do they make good ones that you'd want to buy?
If you don't like that then an alternative law would be that transferring US dollars from USA to a foreign country to buy luxury items has a export tax - however that leads to all sorts of other problems.
Why would they be likely to be different. If I buy a mp3 and store it on MU and someone else pirates it and shares it on MU, the files would very likely be the same.
Forcing removal of all file links which match the pirated copy would cause my legitimate copy of the mp3 to be removed as well as the pirated one. So either they have to prove that there are never any legitimate reasons to store a file on a file sharing service (which is blatantly not the case) or they have to prove each and every instance is infringing and issue a DMCA takedown for each and every instance.
Please try to actually think through what scientists hypothesize (based on historical facts) changes in arable land means, distribution wise.
Oh the irony, isn't the point that scientists hypothesizing (based on historical facts) that climate change is man-made and going to cause massive problems, yet people are willing to call them frauds in one breath and attempt to use their findings to support their theories with the next.
The models do provide falsifiable predictions. If those predictions do not come true then we know that the model is wrong.
For example. The models predict that increasing CO2 concentrations will lead to higher average temperatures. If CO2 concentrations increased and average global temperature decreased then this would show the model was false and the hypothesis that drove the model to be incorrect.
So far models for CO2 concentration vs average global temperature have been roughly correct.
A hypothesis that is not falsified does not mean it is not falsifiable.
Smokers dying young may indeed end up costing a nation less in terms of money. However, Smokers dying young mean that the nation is poorer in terms of well being, happiness and many many other intangibles. It's not a cost/benefit analysis for how much extra medical costs are, it's all about trying to reduce harm.
Probably because they will only need to get traction with a view vendors rather than the general public. It will be easier to do a deal with a TV manufacturer than with a PC vendor, because end users of TVs don't care what they can run on their TV (at the moment) but PC end users do. I'm not saying their push will succeed, but it sounds an easier proposition than trying to convert millions of PC buyers.
So because you've see chaotic poorly managed projects and so has your friend, no-one else could possibly have successfully run agile projects? My own anecdotal evidence to counter your anecdotal evidence is that I've worked on 3 different agile projects at two different companies and know a couple of other agile project, and all have delivered pretty much on-time and within budget - and delivered what the customer actually wanted (which was probably 50% different from what they originally thought they wanted)
That's like saying, look at the funding for physics departments, those that are pro-spherical earth get vastly more funding than those that are flat earth supporters.
The reason that "pro-AGW" scientists get more funding is because there are vastly more scientists who have looked at the evidence and decided that AGW is real than those who do not. It's a consequence of the evidence that AGW is real, not of a conspiracy.
Probably because most of the interesting things that they want to do in a military exercise involves things like subs practising surveillance on coastal installations and in shallow water, and opposing forces, subs, surface ships and planes, attempting to detect/attack them. Also tasks such as amphibious landings. By definition they need to do this in coastal waters and pretty much all coastal waters for NATO countries in northern Europe are close to civilians.
So they can't do much of their exercises out in "empty" international waters.
And then at the deciding, decisive moment, the liberal party decided to throw in with the capital-c Conservatives without consulting its voters or setting out any ground-rules.
You mean "without consulting" in the sense of, for example, holding a special party conference at the NEC to get approval from its party members before signing up to the coalition? If that's not consulting, I'm not sure what is.
This is not about keeping their diminishing royalties. It's more about music companies locking away older works so that classic pubic domain music does not compete with their new products. They don't really care if Cliff Richards makes £10 or £10000 next year from 50 year old music. They just care that you and me can't get 50 year old music as we might spend our time listening to that and therefore buy less (or none) of their current music.
Preventing anyone else from getting 50 year old tunes for free, means that the music industry has a (potentially) higher income from "fresh" music. People can only "consume" so much music, so for every free song that they listen to, that's a lost opportunity for the music industry to have sold them a new song.
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No, it's a dollar that the government has to raise through other tax measures, such as the tax rate you pay (if you are an american citizen), or that the local companies in your area have to pay since they can't offshore their businesses and take advantage of these loopholes.
You know, maybe they get together so that they can be with like minded individuals who they have something in common with. Perhaps they want a break from socialising with people who frequently treat them like second class citizens and despise them for their lack of faith and constantly tell them that they are going to hell.
1. How does science explain where the material for the big bang came from and why it was there? Where's the scientific explanation of the material's origin, I would love to hear it... science only goes so far no matter HOW MUCH of it you accept
As far as I know, science does not yet have a solid theory for how this came about. There are some interesting hypothesises, for example one is that that the universe actually has a net zero energy state. The energy in the matter is balanced by negative gravitational energy - see this article. Of course this is just one hypothesis, there are others. However, just because we don't yet have a complete answer for the origin of the universe doesn't mean that it's acceptable to say "god did it".
Also the origin of the universe has nothing to do with evolution as taught in school and college. The origin of the universe is more properly part of cosmology and physics. Evolution is biology and ONLY deals with how organisms change over time, it doesn't even address how life might have come about in the first place. So if the argument is that we shouldn't teach evolution because science does not yet have a theory about the origin of the universe, you might as well say that we shouldn't teach ANY science at all. Should we not teach chemistry because we don't know where the matter came from, should we ignore physics as well?
So while it's true that science only goes so far as you say that is still not an excuse for not teaching it. Science it can only address topics where, by definition, the scientific method can be applied. Religions' claims are, again by definition, not scientific. One cannot apply the scientific method to supernatural claims - since no hypothesis can be tested; a god could always use its supernatural power to ensure any result it wanted.
2. How did the reproductive system evolve? If the theory of evolution is that mutations that help an organism survive are what get selected, none of the system in either gender existed at the outset, most if not all of it needs to be present in order for it to work, and without it working there is no survival advantage, how did it evolve? Was it just 1,000 random mutations all happening at exactly the same time?
Your first misunderstanding is that the reproductive system needs all of it's current complexity to give an advantage. Being able to combine DNA without having different sexes gives a huge advantage in terms of natural selection, and then once you have that then selection pressure will evolve fitter and fitter mechanism until one has the full complexity that we see today. The system evolved in very very gradual steps. If you are thinking that sexual reproduction is an example of irreducible complexity, then I suggest that you do a little bit of research into it. For example, a quick look at Wikipedia provides a useful starting point for the layman.
I am not really religious. But I will discount all theories of some other being having a hand in creating us when science has a full and fully defensible explanation
So if you discount all theories until there is full and fully defensible explanation, then I guess you discount gravity. That can't be useful at all since we don't yet have a full explanation. Oh wait, yes it's still useful to use Newton's equations even though they've been superseded by Einstein's, and it's useful to use Einstein's even though they don't work so well at the quantum level.
Okay, I'll feed the troll.
White people did "evolve" from black people as you say, however your complete misconception appears to be that evolution means "better", i.e. that white people are better that black people. Yes white people are "fitter" for an environment that it far from the equator. However, black people are "fitter" for an equatorial environment. That's it, that's the only conclusion that you can draw, nothing about any other traits. One cannot draw any conclusion about which is "best" from this evidence - except that black people are "better" for equatorial regions and white people are "better" for non-equatorial regions.
Also don't forget that the black population that remained near the equator also continued to evolve based on fitness for their environment, just as the population who moved away from the equator evolved paler skin based on fitness for their non-equatorial environment.
After years of work I came to the same conclusion the vast majority of Philosophers have, which is that there is probably a creator.
Strange, so a "vast majority" is about 15% right? This 2009 survey shows that 72% of philosophers from major academic institutions lean towards atheism as opposed to the only 15% who lean towards theism.
i simply fail to see how the wholesale swallowing of something as ill-proven and flimsy as evolution does us a whole lot of good today? it doesn't push forward science. it doesn't find the higgs-boson, nor does it enhance quantum-theory. it simply provides something to believe about the origins of the universe if you choose not to believe in a God-created world.
Evolution is a proven fact. There is a huge amounts of evidence, for example DNA. Evolution is the fundamental basis of all of biology and medicine, so you say "it doesn't push forward science", I guess you don't consider the medical breakthroughs that save millions of lives every year as worthwhile or pushing science forward?
the humor here is that evolutionists used to be the skeptics, in a largely God-believing world (however ill-informed). now, we believers are skeptical; we see the leaps of faith required to believe evolution... and the student once again becomes the master. we now get to be the skeptics.
sorry, bill. i'm not buying it. prove it, or accept that it is a theory.
You seem to think that a scientific theory means it's just a guess. A scientific theory is the 'gold standard' of science. The theory of evolution through natural selection (that's the theory not evolution itself, which is an observed fact), is the theory that best fits the huge amount of a facts and evidence that science has collected over the centuries.
I see no scepticism in "believers". They rely on faith rather then evidence for their beliefs, which is pretty much the antonym of scepticism.
There is no way that anyone can prove or disprove what happened to Jesus (assuming an historical Jesus existed), and even if there were incontrovertible evidence that Jesus did exist and was crucified and was seen alive a couple of days later that would still not prove that it was a supernatural event.
For example, which is more likely, that a god brought him back to life, or that he was not actually dead.
Now, let's say that he did actually die (by their definition at the time) and his heart had stopped. We now know that people can be resuscitated from that condition and we don't consider it a supernatural miracle. It's perhaps unlikely that it could have happened in the first century, but unlikely is not impossible and it is much more probable than a supernatural cause.
Finally, Let's say that his heart stopped and he was brain dead. If he then recovered, it would still not be evidence of a supernatural cause. It would be evidence that something had happened that we don't yet understand. It might well be that in certain circumstances there is a natural process by which someone in this state can be resuscitated. We have no evidence that this can happen, but lack of evidence is not a evidence that it is impossible.
Of course the real question is why you'd be trading in Hong Kong from the US when you can co-locate your servers in Hong Kong and run your trading algorithms there.
Why try and save yourself 100ms latency by going through the centre of the earth with neutrinos when you can save all 150ms by putting your computers in the same data centre as the exchange itself! After all you're not going to have a human at the end of the data feed making decisions if you're worried about shaving off milliseconds, it's computers making those decisions based on parameters that humans set. And even if your were, you'd have those humans sitting in Hong Kong.
It seems to work for movies, books and music. Why not TV shows.
The author has said that he was inspired by the English War of the Roses though.
Except in Marks and Spencer where all prices are to the whole pound. To me that always seem more honest and it saves them having to have a lot of pennies in their tills. They just need notes and pound coins.
At least in the UK, the government are wise to that dodge. VAT is charged on the value of the goods or services transferred regardless of the actual price paid. They would certainly look at the car and see that you are selling it for $1, they would adjudicate that it was worth say $50,000 and charge VAT on that value rather than the $1. Most people don't realise this since for the vast majority of the time the price and value are deemed to be the same.
(This is ignoring a single sale between two individuals for which VAT is not applicable, however once you start doing a lot of sales to private individuals you are deemed to be trader and therefore liable for VAT registration).
The US government might not earn tax on it, however the Danish or French governments would. He could buy from a country which doesn't have a sales tax on luxury yachts but do they make good ones that you'd want to buy?
If you don't like that then an alternative law would be that transferring US dollars from USA to a foreign country to buy luxury items has a export tax - however that leads to all sorts of other problems.
Why would they be likely to be different. If I buy a mp3 and store it on MU and someone else pirates it and shares it on MU, the files would very likely be the same.
Forcing removal of all file links which match the pirated copy would cause my legitimate copy of the mp3 to be removed as well as the pirated one. So either they have to prove that there are never any legitimate reasons to store a file on a file sharing service (which is blatantly not the case) or they have to prove each and every instance is infringing and issue a DMCA takedown for each and every instance.
Please try to actually think through what scientists hypothesize (based on historical facts) changes in arable land means, distribution wise.
Oh the irony, isn't the point that scientists hypothesizing (based on historical facts) that climate change is man-made and going to cause massive problems, yet people are willing to call them frauds in one breath and attempt to use their findings to support their theories with the next.
The models do provide falsifiable predictions. If those predictions do not come true then we know that the model is wrong. For example. The models predict that increasing CO2 concentrations will lead to higher average temperatures. If CO2 concentrations increased and average global temperature decreased then this would show the model was false and the hypothesis that drove the model to be incorrect. So far models for CO2 concentration vs average global temperature have been roughly correct. A hypothesis that is not falsified does not mean it is not falsifiable.
Smokers dying young may indeed end up costing a nation less in terms of money. However, Smokers dying young mean that the nation is poorer in terms of well being, happiness and many many other intangibles. It's not a cost/benefit analysis for how much extra medical costs are, it's all about trying to reduce harm.
Probably because they will only need to get traction with a view vendors rather than the general public. It will be easier to do a deal with a TV manufacturer than with a PC vendor, because end users of TVs don't care what they can run on their TV (at the moment) but PC end users do. I'm not saying their push will succeed, but it sounds an easier proposition than trying to convert millions of PC buyers.
So because you've see chaotic poorly managed projects and so has your friend, no-one else could possibly have successfully run agile projects? My own anecdotal evidence to counter your anecdotal evidence is that I've worked on 3 different agile projects at two different companies and know a couple of other agile project, and all have delivered pretty much on-time and within budget - and delivered what the customer actually wanted (which was probably 50% different from what they originally thought they wanted)
That's like saying, look at the funding for physics departments, those that are pro-spherical earth get vastly more funding than those that are flat earth supporters. The reason that "pro-AGW" scientists get more funding is because there are vastly more scientists who have looked at the evidence and decided that AGW is real than those who do not. It's a consequence of the evidence that AGW is real, not of a conspiracy.
Probably because most of the interesting things that they want to do in a military exercise involves things like subs practising surveillance on coastal installations and in shallow water, and opposing forces, subs, surface ships and planes, attempting to detect/attack them. Also tasks such as amphibious landings. By definition they need to do this in coastal waters and pretty much all coastal waters for NATO countries in northern Europe are close to civilians. So they can't do much of their exercises out in "empty" international waters.
And then at the deciding, decisive moment, the liberal party decided to throw in with the capital-c Conservatives without consulting its voters or setting out any ground-rules.
You mean "without consulting" in the sense of, for example, holding a special party conference at the NEC to get approval from its party members before signing up to the coalition? If that's not consulting, I'm not sure what is.
This is not about keeping their diminishing royalties. It's more about music companies locking away older works so that classic pubic domain music does not compete with their new products. They don't really care if Cliff Richards makes £10 or £10000 next year from 50 year old music. They just care that you and me can't get 50 year old music as we might spend our time listening to that and therefore buy less (or none) of their current music.
Preventing anyone else from getting 50 year old tunes for free, means that the music industry has a (potentially) higher income from "fresh" music. People can only "consume" so much music, so for every free song that they listen to, that's a lost opportunity for the music industry to have sold them a new song.
How does something evolve that kills its host and thus kills itself?
It will be fine as long as it can reproduce before it kills its host/itself.