the failure of radio astronomy to detect signals coming from other civilizations
EM communications are probably not the most advanced method out there, not to mention that the idea that EM signals can travel indefinitely has been debunked. Even if there were signals out there, they probably wouldn't reach us intact. Add to this the 'Apes or Angels' view of development.
the calculations being done by several people, based on evolutionary science and bio-chemistry, of the probability of life forming spontaneously
Based again on a sample size of ONE. That's not science any more than the Drake Equation. Only in the last century or so have we finally figured out roughly how life formed here, once, and even that not completely, and now we want to pretend we can extend that rough understanding to billions or trillions of unexplored environments and unknown conditions? Really? NOT. SCIENCE.
What is your point? Most researchers have 'expectations' or 'hopes' about their research, that's what peer review is for, to make sure that their personal biases don't get the best of them. Why shouldn't we hope? And aside from your sociological anecdotes, why too should we not expect? I'll grant that the existence of adapted extremophile life forms on Earth is not in of itself credible as a foundation for thinking that such hardy things would spontaneously form out of the gate, but that's assuming that all life forms locally. There remains the possibility that very hardy strains can travel through space on debris.
I think any rational person would take exception to you claiming that a probability model about the formation of life (based on a sample size of... ONE) as an 'empirical fact'. That would suggest you don't really know what empiricism is. Until we have surveyed larger portions of Mars and other parts of the solar system in greater detail, there are no 'empirical facts' about the presence or lack of life in any form.
Taiwan does have a modest missile defense system based on PAC-2s & -3s that protects the highest value targets. Also, though I wouldn't depend on the integrity of the current USDoD to follow through with it, there is technically also Oplan 5077-04.
Self-sufficiency, in any case, is never irrelevant. It's better to have something and hope to be able to field it than to have nothing and just sit around and wait for the end.
Except in that case, 'they' isn't 4chan leadership like moot, it's just Anonymous #1 saying to Anonymous #2, hey, let's go do this, and then a fuckton of people sign on to it. 'Project Chanology' was something of a fluke, insofar as it accomplished something approaching 'useful', but most chanraids are just immature griefer mobs that do things like close the pool at Habbo Hotel.
4chan has provided a means by which people can organize themselves with little fear of social retribution, but 4chan itself is NOT an organizing force.
This is why it's so important for Taiwan/ROC to continue programs like the Indigenous Defense Fighter, but the KMT is too busy irrumating the PRC to pay any attention to real interests of their own constituency.
Maybe some of the US hardware from Iran during the Shah era has flowed to Syria? That's the thing with military hardware, once you sell it to somebody, there's very little you can do to keep them from passing it to somebody else. In that context, kill switches are genius (assuming the 'enemy' doesn't hack your Gibson).
You apparently don't know what a strawman is. I cite the War of Independence as an example of how Americans have not been 'brainwashed'. A strawman would have been a weaker distortion of the parent's argument which would then have been attacked, not a counter example.
It wasn't about taxes. it was about not ahving a say in the government nor any protection from the government. Not just 'taxes'.
Never did I say taxes were not necessary. They are the very definition of a necessary evil, because while society cannot function without them, at the same time they are almost always inefficient, unfair, and damaging to growth.
To quote Cullen Hightower: "There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else."
A President should veto bad legislation on principle regardless of what Congress may or may not do next, otherwise they are, obviously, unprincipled and too weak to deserve the office. If Bill Clinton had actually vetoed the bill and it passed anyway, I would never have attributed blame to him, since he would have obviously done what was within his power to try to stop it. As it was, the CFMA passed on his watch, he did not use the full powers of his office to try to stop it, and therefore the blame is his. Get over it.
Seriously? Ever heard of black people? Ever heard of native americans? Ever read a fucking history book?? "Oh, but that was a hundred years ago". Yeah, and look around. How different are things? Go walk through a ghetto and see what Christianity did for black people.
FACT: America exists because of slavery and genocide that was sold to the populace under the cloak of religion. See, e.g. manifest destiny.
While Christianity is tolerant of slavery (which was a matter of socio-political convenience to get traction in the Roman world), it's unfair to act like Christianity is a cause or origin of slavery. Every major civilization in the world had slavery in some form at some time. The blame should be spread throughout humanity on that issue. Neither the US nor even 'Christendom' were the first nor last to use or abolish slavery. Slavery is neither a solely American nor Christian issue. Treating it as such is disingenuous.
As for how things are different, Native Americans today are now more wealthy and more free from government interference than most people in the US. And blaming Christianity for ghettos is absurd.
While China remains unquestionably a totalitarian state, it is less and less 'communist' every year.While many of China's largest industries are still wholly or partially owned by the state, that's no different from most countries worldwide. The important difference between China today and the hardline communist era is that Chinese workers are increasingly able to decide their own destinies, which aligns China functionally with most modern socialist nations. (Not that I think that's a 'good thing' but it's better than things once were. At least China isn't North Korea.) Really the world is so interested in China's rise because it is using its growth to fund buying interests worldwide, a course of action made even more powerful during the devaluing effects of a recession. China is putting itself in the catbird seat ironically by the same method that made the US the dominant power in the 20th century: economic conquest. If you have time, pick up the current issue of Fortune magazine at a library or something and read their article on China's diversification of worldwide interests.
However on the issue at hand, it is my opinion that the internet will manage to prevent any crazy religion from overturning civilization and bringing another dark age upon humanity.
That would be valid if I were saying 'experts are right because they are experts' however in this context given the post to which I was replying the implied argument is more along the lines of 'experts are right because their fishing management policy has resulted in verifiable positive changes to areas in which it has been implemented.' Thus, no fallacy. And you imply that you've studied debate? I'd recommend hitting those books again padawan.
While I knew about Heller, I was under the impression that most semi-autos were still banned; however, it seems just last month the DC council decided it was better for them to repeal that law than let Congress do it (as a bill was on the move that would have). So that's two steps in the right direction. Now if only the licensing, registration, and may issue position on concealment could be rolled back, DC might finally have a system comparable to most states in the union.
Yes, I know. I work in DC. And they can have representation when they give their citizens the Second Amendment rights that the rest of the US enjoys. (That actually has frequently been the condition outlined by conservatives in Congress whenever the issue has come up to a vote.)
Sooo it's Bush's fault for not doing anything about inheriting credit default swaps, but Obama is blameless even though worse than doing nothing, he actively reaffirmed warrantless wiretapping. That's a huge double standard. (Also congress doesn't 'enforce laws'. Remember your basic civics, congress passes laws, the executive enforces laws, and the judiciary interprets laws.)
I think you fail to understand what happens when you lose your job.
I have been unemployed about a dozen times in the last seven years. Granted I'm a contractor and that's somewhat par for the course, but not every lapse was foreseen. Also, I have never taken unemployment insurance money.
I still don't think you understand unemployment turn-over. 'Ridiculous high turn-over' as you say would be, in the otherwise inherently negative terms of unemployment, the best possible scenario. It means that a lot of people are being (relatively) minimally damaged, whereas slow turnover means a few people are being virtually destroyed. No kind of unemployment is good, but the shorter the better, and when periods are short, turn-over is high, therefore turn-over is good, insofar as it is superior to more static, more destructive scenarios. If some people made such unwise decisions as a few weeks of unemployment ends up being destructive to them, fuck 'em. They made their bed and they can lie in it.
I don't know about today, but even during the peak of Mayan civilization, estimates of literacy in their society by archaeologists and anthropologists was less than 5%. (IIRC)
Is a failure to fix a broken program any different than creating the program yourself? Obviously Bush agreed with it and so he did nothing.
So I take it you'll hold Mr. Obama to his failings regarding warrantless wiretapping, the PATRIOT Act, telecom immunity, etc? I suspect you'll probably vote for him when the time comes. Very few people vote on principle anymore, and then we point fingers at everybody but ourselves when the shit 'we' voted hits the two elected branches of government.
(Also, people 'blame the [P]resident' because he is supposed to be the last line of defense against bad laws. It's one thing if the President vetoes something and congress overrides it, at least that shows he has some integrity, but to do nothing at all is, as you said yourself, as responsible as doing it directly.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about unemployment. Turnover is not just how it works, but how it SHOULD work. If the same x number were unemployed month to month, it would be a fuckton worse than if different people were, as that x number would rapidly move from 'inconvenienced' to 'bankrupt'. Most sensible people can handle a few weeks or even a few months of unemployment, but few can endure several months or more. Unemployment with high turnover is a BETTER economic state than unemployment with low turnover, because that creates wards of the state and debts that will never be paid.
I hope you're being deliberately obtuse. Do you think that thousands of people would risk their lives and fortunes if they thought the tax laws were fair? Do you think that if rank and file colonists truly believed that their interests were being served, regardless of the political system, that there would have been open, violent revolution? 'No taxation without representation' was a simple trope that encapsulated an idea. If there were cars in the 18th century it would have been a bumper sticker, but you're attempting to read it like a law or some transcendent principle of social illumination of the period.
Representation was simply a catalyst to the larger and deeper issue of taxation that had been brewing ever since the Seven Years' War created a debt that somebody had to pay. Taxation as the more key issue is underscored by the fact that the first outbreak of violence after the Revolution was another tax revolt, the Whiskey Rebellion, because in the hard times after the war, the colonists-turned-Americans didn't much care to be paying new masters instead of old ones. (Hell, even DURING the revolution there was Shays' Rebellion, another tax revolt.)
How long before the recession was the CFMA passed? 8 years. By YOUR logic then, Clinton was the cause of the recession, and further the good ol' Clinton years were all Reagan and HW Bush's doing. Not only that, but any economic turn around during the Obama administration will be, by this magical assumption, also creditable to George W. Bush! Of course this is all hogwash. The nation's economy is far more complex than to be ruled by an oversimplified priciple such as the one you suggest. Lucky for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
I voted for Barr.
the failure of radio astronomy to detect signals coming from other civilizations
EM communications are probably not the most advanced method out there, not to mention that the idea that EM signals can travel indefinitely has been debunked. Even if there were signals out there, they probably wouldn't reach us intact. Add to this the 'Apes or Angels' view of development.
the calculations being done by several people, based on evolutionary science and bio-chemistry, of the probability of life forming spontaneously
Based again on a sample size of ONE. That's not science any more than the Drake Equation. Only in the last century or so have we finally figured out roughly how life formed here, once, and even that not completely, and now we want to pretend we can extend that rough understanding to billions or trillions of unexplored environments and unknown conditions? Really? NOT. SCIENCE.
Mod parent up.
What is your point? Most researchers have 'expectations' or 'hopes' about their research, that's what peer review is for, to make sure that their personal biases don't get the best of them. Why shouldn't we hope? And aside from your sociological anecdotes, why too should we not expect? I'll grant that the existence of adapted extremophile life forms on Earth is not in of itself credible as a foundation for thinking that such hardy things would spontaneously form out of the gate, but that's assuming that all life forms locally. There remains the possibility that very hardy strains can travel through space on debris.
... ONE) as an 'empirical fact'. That would suggest you don't really know what empiricism is. Until we have surveyed larger portions of Mars and other parts of the solar system in greater detail, there are no 'empirical facts' about the presence or lack of life in any form.
I think any rational person would take exception to you claiming that a probability model about the formation of life (based on a sample size of
Apparently you've never heard of Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development.
Any extrasolar threat large enough to COMPLETELY sterilize Earth is likely to do the same to Mars.
(Not that I otherwise disagree with the sentiment.)
Taiwan does have a modest missile defense system based on PAC-2s & -3s that protects the highest value targets. Also, though I wouldn't depend on the integrity of the current USDoD to follow through with it, there is technically also Oplan 5077-04.
Self-sufficiency, in any case, is never irrelevant. It's better to have something and hope to be able to field it than to have nothing and just sit around and wait for the end.
Except in that case, 'they' isn't 4chan leadership like moot, it's just Anonymous #1 saying to Anonymous #2, hey, let's go do this, and then a fuckton of people sign on to it. 'Project Chanology' was something of a fluke, insofar as it accomplished something approaching 'useful', but most chanraids are just immature griefer mobs that do things like close the pool at Habbo Hotel.
4chan has provided a means by which people can organize themselves with little fear of social retribution, but 4chan itself is NOT an organizing force.
If you think 4chan is organized I suspect you've never been there.
This is why it's so important for Taiwan/ROC to continue programs like the Indigenous Defense Fighter, but the KMT is too busy irrumating the PRC to pay any attention to real interests of their own constituency.
Maybe some of the US hardware from Iran during the Shah era has flowed to Syria? That's the thing with military hardware, once you sell it to somebody, there's very little you can do to keep them from passing it to somebody else. In that context, kill switches are genius (assuming the 'enemy' doesn't hack your Gibson).
4chan is not your personal army...
It wasn't about taxes. it was about not ahving a say in the government nor any protection from the government. Not just 'taxes'.
See post here.
Never did I say taxes were not necessary. They are the very definition of a necessary evil, because while society cannot function without them, at the same time they are almost always inefficient, unfair, and damaging to growth.
To quote Cullen Hightower: "There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else."
A President should veto bad legislation on principle regardless of what Congress may or may not do next, otherwise they are, obviously, unprincipled and too weak to deserve the office. If Bill Clinton had actually vetoed the bill and it passed anyway, I would never have attributed blame to him, since he would have obviously done what was within his power to try to stop it. As it was, the CFMA passed on his watch, he did not use the full powers of his office to try to stop it, and therefore the blame is his. Get over it.
Seriously? Ever heard of black people? Ever heard of native americans? Ever read a fucking history book?? "Oh, but that was a hundred years ago". Yeah, and look around. How different are things? Go walk through a ghetto and see what Christianity did for black people. FACT: America exists because of slavery and genocide that was sold to the populace under the cloak of religion. See, e.g. manifest destiny.
While Christianity is tolerant of slavery (which was a matter of socio-political convenience to get traction in the Roman world), it's unfair to act like Christianity is a cause or origin of slavery. Every major civilization in the world had slavery in some form at some time. The blame should be spread throughout humanity on that issue. Neither the US nor even 'Christendom' were the first nor last to use or abolish slavery. Slavery is neither a solely American nor Christian issue. Treating it as such is disingenuous.
As for how things are different, Native Americans today are now more wealthy and more free from government interference than most people in the US. And blaming Christianity for ghettos is absurd.
I say all this as an atheist myself.
While China remains unquestionably a totalitarian state, it is less and less 'communist' every year.While many of China's largest industries are still wholly or partially owned by the state, that's no different from most countries worldwide. The important difference between China today and the hardline communist era is that Chinese workers are increasingly able to decide their own destinies, which aligns China functionally with most modern socialist nations. (Not that I think that's a 'good thing' but it's better than things once were. At least China isn't North Korea.) Really the world is so interested in China's rise because it is using its growth to fund buying interests worldwide, a course of action made even more powerful during the devaluing effects of a recession. China is putting itself in the catbird seat ironically by the same method that made the US the dominant power in the 20th century: economic conquest. If you have time, pick up the current issue of Fortune magazine at a library or something and read their article on China's diversification of worldwide interests.
However on the issue at hand, it is my opinion that the internet will manage to prevent any crazy religion from overturning civilization and bringing another dark age upon humanity.
That would be valid if I were saying 'experts are right because they are experts' however in this context given the post to which I was replying the implied argument is more along the lines of 'experts are right because their fishing management policy has resulted in verifiable positive changes to areas in which it has been implemented.' Thus, no fallacy. And you imply that you've studied debate? I'd recommend hitting those books again padawan.
While I knew about Heller, I was under the impression that most semi-autos were still banned; however, it seems just last month the DC council decided it was better for them to repeal that law than let Congress do it (as a bill was on the move that would have). So that's two steps in the right direction. Now if only the licensing, registration, and may issue position on concealment could be rolled back, DC might finally have a system comparable to most states in the union.
Yes, I know. I work in DC. And they can have representation when they give their citizens the Second Amendment rights that the rest of the US enjoys. (That actually has frequently been the condition outlined by conservatives in Congress whenever the issue has come up to a vote.)
I think you fail to understand what happens when you lose your job.
I have been unemployed about a dozen times in the last seven years. Granted I'm a contractor and that's somewhat par for the course, but not every lapse was foreseen. Also, I have never taken unemployment insurance money.
I still don't think you understand unemployment turn-over. 'Ridiculous high turn-over' as you say would be, in the otherwise inherently negative terms of unemployment, the best possible scenario. It means that a lot of people are being (relatively) minimally damaged, whereas slow turnover means a few people are being virtually destroyed. No kind of unemployment is good, but the shorter the better, and when periods are short, turn-over is high, therefore turn-over is good, insofar as it is superior to more static, more destructive scenarios. If some people made such unwise decisions as a few weeks of unemployment ends up being destructive to them, fuck 'em. They made their bed and they can lie in it.
I don't know about today, but even during the peak of Mayan civilization, estimates of literacy in their society by archaeologists and anthropologists was less than 5%. (IIRC)
Is a failure to fix a broken program any different than creating the program yourself? Obviously Bush agreed with it and so he did nothing.
So I take it you'll hold Mr. Obama to his failings regarding warrantless wiretapping, the PATRIOT Act, telecom immunity, etc? I suspect you'll probably vote for him when the time comes. Very few people vote on principle anymore, and then we point fingers at everybody but ourselves when the shit 'we' voted hits the two elected branches of government.
(Also, people 'blame the [P]resident' because he is supposed to be the last line of defense against bad laws. It's one thing if the President vetoes something and congress overrides it, at least that shows he has some integrity, but to do nothing at all is, as you said yourself, as responsible as doing it directly.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say about unemployment. Turnover is not just how it works, but how it SHOULD work. If the same x number were unemployed month to month, it would be a fuckton worse than if different people were, as that x number would rapidly move from 'inconvenienced' to 'bankrupt'. Most sensible people can handle a few weeks or even a few months of unemployment, but few can endure several months or more. Unemployment with high turnover is a BETTER economic state than unemployment with low turnover, because that creates wards of the state and debts that will never be paid.
I hope you're being deliberately obtuse. Do you think that thousands of people would risk their lives and fortunes if they thought the tax laws were fair? Do you think that if rank and file colonists truly believed that their interests were being served, regardless of the political system, that there would have been open, violent revolution? 'No taxation without representation' was a simple trope that encapsulated an idea. If there were cars in the 18th century it would have been a bumper sticker, but you're attempting to read it like a law or some transcendent principle of social illumination of the period.
Representation was simply a catalyst to the larger and deeper issue of taxation that had been brewing ever since the Seven Years' War created a debt that somebody had to pay. Taxation as the more key issue is underscored by the fact that the first outbreak of violence after the Revolution was another tax revolt, the Whiskey Rebellion, because in the hard times after the war, the colonists-turned-Americans didn't much care to be paying new masters instead of old ones. (Hell, even DURING the revolution there was Shays' Rebellion, another tax revolt.)
How long before the recession was the CFMA passed? 8 years. By YOUR logic then, Clinton was the cause of the recession, and further the good ol' Clinton years were all Reagan and HW Bush's doing. Not only that, but any economic turn around during the Obama administration will be, by this magical assumption, also creditable to George W. Bush! Of course this is all hogwash. The nation's economy is far more complex than to be ruled by an oversimplified priciple such as the one you suggest. Lucky for you.