Problem with doing that is that you wipe out the imaginary nest egg that millions of baby boomers have in their housing values to rely on for retirement now, rather than later. And that's an awful lot of people in their 50's and 60's to bankrupt and/or force retention in the job market long past their prime. Not to mention clog up social movement/career advancement for the younger generations. There simply is no good answer.
At some point, having a disagreement/debate with someone becomes about personal perception and world view. All the truth in the world on your side just won't make a damn bit of difference if the person you're debating/disagreeing with just cannot or will not come around to your point of view. Gay Marriage, Abortion, Climate Change, Conservative/Liberal, at some point it all comes down to one thing: you are facing your polar opposite and you cannot give in because to do so would mean that you are no longer 'right'.
It is at that point that we resort to killing each other.
No, what's going to be stupid are all the bimbos who are going to rush out and get their hoo-hoos altered to be able to accept said 400lb 6 foot appendages. Gaping gateway to Hell will take on a whole new meaning.
Not one that I want to consider. I don't want to hate my fellow countrymen just because they're conservatives, but I'm wondering if my fellow conservative countrymen are having the same thoughts I am...
What happens if the musical download occurs illegally, and then the person who downloaded it for free turns around and attempts to sell it to someone else? Or, what if someone pirates a book, then attempts to pass it off as his or her own and claim the credit for it by selling it on an ebook vendor site? If piracy is not theft, then how do we guard against those two hypotheticals (sadly, not a hypothetical in the latter case)?
So what are you going to do about it? And what will you do when you realize that they are just as committed to their beliefs, in spite of the weight of evidence against them, as you are to the weight of evidence that says you're right. What will you do when you realize that they won't back down and that their resolve to stand defiant in the face of "secular tyranny" will only harden? Are you going to continue trying to influence their children and destroy their faith from within? Are you going to allow them to do the same to you? How long will you continue doing this before you get tired of the whole thing and decide that more direct action is required? And are you prepared to destroy someone's beliefs, someone's family, and someone's hopes for the future in the name of your Truth?
Cold Hard Science which has failed, and in many ways encouraged, the resistance of the fundamentalists against the advance of the ideology they perceive-quite rightly-as antithetical to their own. It's not about FACT, it's about faith and all the facts in the world will not sway someone who holds absolute conviction in a set of ideals because someone they do not like is telling them they're flat-out wrong. We've had two or three generations now to impress on the world the truth of the Big Bang and Evolution, and yet there continues to be this level of strife. So I'm going to ask you: are you prepared to pull the trigger first?
Because if there's no middle ground, and no room to find compromise or discussion, then we're going to have to start killing all those who disagree with us.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "natural things". However, there was an amendment passed to ban alcohol, so that alone makes Prohibition perfectly Constitutional, and the reason a second Amendment was required to overturn it.
I'm thinking we need a new Amendment that states that no Amendment can contradict or repeal an older Amendment, or contradict anything else in the Constitution, no matter what.
that if a constitutional amendment such as this was passed, you'd repeal the repeals of Prohibition, Women's suffrage, slavery, direct election of senators, and basically every constitutional amendment back to the original Bill of Rights, thus automatically turning everyone who isn't white into a slave, women into second-class citizens, AND prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol? We'd be ruled by sober, white land-owning twits!
I don't know, I thought in ME3 they portrayed the gay characters exceptionally well. That scene where Cortez posts the vid of his dead husband to the memorial wall was heartbreaking for me. I finally got what "Don't make me into an anchor" meant, and I cried. Or when Samara prepares to execute herself because she cannot carry out the Code against her own daughter.
Because you're not actually choosing anything. You're simply sorting for the optimal combination to meet a given need, given the input of data. You're going to use that nutritional information, combined with the ambient data you've already collected and processed about what's healthy for you and what isn't, and you're going to arrive at the best, most optimal product that balances your desire against the mandate to remain healthy.
If you took away all that information and were left with the two buckets, then it's _you_ who has to deal with the uncertainties and make the choice, and then discover the consequences. To me, what you've described is the desire to reduce uncertainty so that you can make the correct choice.
It seems to me that ignorance is inversely proportional to the ability to make a conscious, self-determined choice. The more information I have about a given set of options, the less I'm able to make a choice based solely on my own preferences. Instead, I'm hampered by the knowledge that one particular option is better for me than others as determined by sources outside my control, and therefore (perhaps against my personal inclination) I'm going to lean towards the option that is better for me.
In this particular instance regarding calorie count, I'm aware due to education and awareness campaigns that more calories without moderation are a bad thing, both for me and for society. Morally, I know that I should reduce calorie intake to a moderate amount that is healthy for me. Moreover, the government and social scientists are aware that providing me with objective data that clearly states the best way to take care of myself is going to incentivize me to make the right choice. By capitalizing on these memes and trends, and posting calorie counts plus other nutritional data that is factual and accurate, the government and society is trying to push me to make the right choice both for society and myself. While the data may be factually, statistically, and scientifically accurate, the way and method in which it is introduced to me is biased. I already know that the Triple Baconator is bad for me, but by showing me calorie count, I'm going to make a further emotional connection that the Baconator is bad, read information that verifies that it is bad, and further convince myself that I should eat a salad instead. At that point, my will to choose is weakened, and I'm probably going to go with the salad.
The point I am trying to make is that by increasing the amount of data available for consumers to read, thus reducing ignorance as close to nil as possible, we are actually eroding the ability of people to make conscious, self-determined choices based on what they prefer. Instead, it influences people to choose the "correct" option (correct meaning that the data says that option A is more optimal than option B, and only idiots would prefer a less-optimal solution). And if we choose the "correct" option every time, how long before that becomes the only option?
It's the expansion of the "Nanny" state. Essentially, the government trying to intimidate or coerce people into making a healthy decision for their own good. Yes, posting the calorie count is an objective act. People are free to read the number and then decide for themselves. But it's the issue that the "Government" is forcing businesses to reveal calorie count in the name of trying to create a more healthy society, and thus subtly impinging on a person's ability to make a choice for good or ill.
Personally I view it as protecting the right to sin. We have to have free choice, which means we have to have the right to be able to freely choose what is wrong for both us and society. If we take away the right to choose what's wrong for us, then we begin to remove what makes us unique and individual. Doesn't mean we're immune to the consequences, but we must have the ability to choose. Like abortion: no matter how horrific the practice may be in its extremes, or how morally abhorrent the practice may be, we MUST allow women the right to choose. Otherwise we run the risk of creating a benevolent tyranny that seeks to protect us from ourselves--and a benevolent tyranny is still tyranny.
There would be no more heroes, and no more villains. Stories would be told about cooperation against implacable obstacles and overcoming overwhelming odds. There would be no deviation from the norm because good would 'be' the norm. For that matter, there would be no more free will, or choice. Only totally rational automatons always cooperating together, no matter what. There would be no more right, no more wrong. There would be only ONE mind, one ideology because without wrongness, without evil there would be no variation.
Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong, but wasn't Paul (or one of the anonymous authors writing under the Paul psuedonym) responsible for the decree that priests of the Catholic Church be celibate in order to focus their energies on God?
We had the kind of justice system you describe in place for most of recorded human history. The Romans crucified hundreds of thousands over their thousand year reign, the Janissaries of the Caliphate used to drop prisoners onto large spikes and impale them while alive as a warning to others, and so on and so forth. People still committed crimes. All you're advocating is reforming the system to provide immense personal satisfaction and vengeance to the wronged, rather than actual penance and rehabilitation.
Damn it all RockoTDF, here I went and outdid myself in one of my sparse trolling efforts, and not only do you repudiate me well (I had you pegged for a deterministic reductionista), you also surprisingly share many of the same opinions I do (I did as you suggested and reviewed your profile and postings) only you're more literate and educated about the subjects than I am. I hereby anoint myself for the rest of the day as a world-class asshole who made a gigantic error in judgment in choosing you to troll. My job (that of being an intentional douche-bag) is done, and I'm going to go retreat under my bridge and lick my wounds.
I'm just curious, did you miss the part in the article where Pfizer invested $1B and had 25,000 volunteers with an entire research team dedicated to torcetrapib, following all appropriate research protocols? Now, I'm sure you're a flawless genius who gets research protocols right every time all the time and thus has standing to criticize a giant of the pharmaceutical industry, but I'm also willing to venture a guess that $1B, a dedicated corporate research team, and 25,000 volunteers gets some pretty decent results, plus properly-set up control and empirical groups.
No, I'm pretty sure (and here's where I'm going to get personally insulting and troll you, so please take notice) you're a strong believer in the reductionable determinism of the universe. You probably believe that Truth is objective, and that any and all problems can be solved by science given enough time, resources, and protocols. You probably believe that Error is first and foremost a product of faulty ill-disciplined minds, and that with enough attention and self-discipline Error can be eliminated from existence. And you probably also believe that we don't have souls and that we're just a bunch of biological automatons running on complex whorls of instinctual-based wetware who can be programmed and re-programmed at whim. Am I stinging yet? No, probably not. But here's where I am going to sting you: You're wrong. This article wasn't about inappropriate research protocols and projects being undertaken by highly paid idiots, this is a meditation on the nature of error and how our understanding of causality is flawed due to emphasis on deterministic, reductionable dogma spouted by idiots like yourself (and trust me sir, you ARE an idiot) who believe that everything can be predicted, measured, and known, and that we're all just mindless automatons groping in the endless dark. YOU are too attached to your idea of determinism and reductionism and that everything can be guessed, and so you fired off an emotional objection in which you masqueraded opinions as fact and TOLD A STORY about what you think happened (asserting it as Truth) rather than what actually did happen. And that is why YOU, sir, and others who spout similar dogmatic attitudes to yours are idiots of the finest caliber.
and yes, it was worth the emotional expenditure to troll you for just a second. Now please, laugh at me, shrug off my little attempt and rationalize it, then go back to being a mindless automaton with illusions of sentience and output your data in your meaningless life--which will soon end with extinction of your consciousness (and those of everyone you've ever cared about).
I challenge you to read Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz, and then come back to your statement. OP is right: we will NEVER be able to solve everything. It's wrong-facing Turtles all the way down.
Geekoid, the point you are missing is that for thousands of years Man has said what you said: "In fact, it seems likely, based on how much we know in the very short time..." etc. You are ignoring completely the nature of error itself, in that any definition or system we come up with is going to be Wrong on some level at some point, and therefore we are always going to be learning more and more. There is no objective Truth, and reality is not completely reductive,
For instance, you might tell me that mathematics is a pure system without flaw and that we've figured it out entirely. I would rebut with the fact that we've based our entire mathematical system around base 10, and base 10 has it's own flaws: one of which is Pi. Pi, in base 10, cannot ever be calculated out.
The point of this article was to attack those who believe that all answers can be discovered given enough time, resources, and application of proper scientific rigor and principle to a given issue. All the scientific process does is show us how to reduce a given problem into its components and understand how they work in conjunction. It works exceptionally well, but it is not perfect, and it does not necessarily scale upward.
What brain, Elrous0? You don't have one! You're just a distributed hive entity consisting of the ganglion of harvested lobsters that have been reconstituted into a virtual matrix and then forced to run on a Pentium II with about 500 MBs of RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem with doing that is that you wipe out the imaginary nest egg that millions of baby boomers have in their housing values to rely on for retirement now, rather than later. And that's an awful lot of people in their 50's and 60's to bankrupt and/or force retention in the job market long past their prime. Not to mention clog up social movement/career advancement for the younger generations. There simply is no good answer.
Yup, I'm a dad and one of my sworn duties is to turn off lights. Tempted to get the light switch sensors like we have at work.
Ah yes, it's true that children brighten up the home.
When you light them on fire.
I don't know about you, but I live in mortal fear of getting the shit kicked out of me by turtles. Especially Raphael.
Agreed. It's when you involve human opinion that things get messy...
At some point, having a disagreement/debate with someone becomes about personal perception and world view. All the truth in the world on your side just won't make a damn bit of difference if the person you're debating/disagreeing with just cannot or will not come around to your point of view. Gay Marriage, Abortion, Climate Change, Conservative/Liberal, at some point it all comes down to one thing: you are facing your polar opposite and you cannot give in because to do so would mean that you are no longer 'right'.
It is at that point that we resort to killing each other.
No, what's going to be stupid are all the bimbos who are going to rush out and get their hoo-hoos altered to be able to accept said 400lb 6 foot appendages. Gaping gateway to Hell will take on a whole new meaning.
Not one that I want to consider. I don't want to hate my fellow countrymen just because they're conservatives, but I'm wondering if my fellow conservative countrymen are having the same thoughts I am...
What happens if the musical download occurs illegally, and then the person who downloaded it for free turns around and attempts to sell it to someone else? Or, what if someone pirates a book, then attempts to pass it off as his or her own and claim the credit for it by selling it on an ebook vendor site? If piracy is not theft, then how do we guard against those two hypotheticals (sadly, not a hypothetical in the latter case)?
So what are you going to do about it? And what will you do when you realize that they are just as committed to their beliefs, in spite of the weight of evidence against them, as you are to the weight of evidence that says you're right. What will you do when you realize that they won't back down and that their resolve to stand defiant in the face of "secular tyranny" will only harden? Are you going to continue trying to influence their children and destroy their faith from within? Are you going to allow them to do the same to you? How long will you continue doing this before you get tired of the whole thing and decide that more direct action is required? And are you prepared to destroy someone's beliefs, someone's family, and someone's hopes for the future in the name of your Truth?
Cold Hard Science which has failed, and in many ways encouraged, the resistance of the fundamentalists against the advance of the ideology they perceive-quite rightly-as antithetical to their own. It's not about FACT, it's about faith and all the facts in the world will not sway someone who holds absolute conviction in a set of ideals because someone they do not like is telling them they're flat-out wrong. We've had two or three generations now to impress on the world the truth of the Big Bang and Evolution, and yet there continues to be this level of strife. So I'm going to ask you: are you prepared to pull the trigger first?
Because if there's no middle ground, and no room to find compromise or discussion, then we're going to have to start killing all those who disagree with us.
There's absolutely nothing in the Constitution about "natural things". However, there was an amendment passed to ban alcohol, so that alone makes Prohibition perfectly Constitutional, and the reason a second Amendment was required to overturn it.
I'm thinking we need a new Amendment that states that no Amendment can contradict or repeal an older Amendment, or contradict anything else in the Constitution, no matter what.
that if a constitutional amendment such as this was passed, you'd repeal the repeals of Prohibition, Women's suffrage, slavery, direct election of senators, and basically every constitutional amendment back to the original Bill of Rights, thus automatically turning everyone who isn't white into a slave, women into second-class citizens, AND prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol? We'd be ruled by sober, white land-owning twits!
I don't know, I thought in ME3 they portrayed the gay characters exceptionally well. That scene where Cortez posts the vid of his dead husband to the memorial wall was heartbreaking for me. I finally got what "Don't make me into an anchor" meant, and I cried. Or when Samara prepares to execute herself because she cannot carry out the Code against her own daughter.
Because you're not actually choosing anything. You're simply sorting for the optimal combination to meet a given need, given the input of data. You're going to use that nutritional information, combined with the ambient data you've already collected and processed about what's healthy for you and what isn't, and you're going to arrive at the best, most optimal product that balances your desire against the mandate to remain healthy.
If you took away all that information and were left with the two buckets, then it's _you_ who has to deal with the uncertainties and make the choice, and then discover the consequences. To me, what you've described is the desire to reduce uncertainty so that you can make the correct choice.
It seems to me that ignorance is inversely proportional to the ability to make a conscious, self-determined choice. The more information I have about a given set of options, the less I'm able to make a choice based solely on my own preferences. Instead, I'm hampered by the knowledge that one particular option is better for me than others as determined by sources outside my control, and therefore (perhaps against my personal inclination) I'm going to lean towards the option that is better for me.
In this particular instance regarding calorie count, I'm aware due to education and awareness campaigns that more calories without moderation are a bad thing, both for me and for society. Morally, I know that I should reduce calorie intake to a moderate amount that is healthy for me. Moreover, the government and social scientists are aware that providing me with objective data that clearly states the best way to take care of myself is going to incentivize me to make the right choice. By capitalizing on these memes and trends, and posting calorie counts plus other nutritional data that is factual and accurate, the government and society is trying to push me to make the right choice both for society and myself. While the data may be factually, statistically, and scientifically accurate, the way and method in which it is introduced to me is biased. I already know that the Triple Baconator is bad for me, but by showing me calorie count, I'm going to make a further emotional connection that the Baconator is bad, read information that verifies that it is bad, and further convince myself that I should eat a salad instead. At that point, my will to choose is weakened, and I'm probably going to go with the salad.
The point I am trying to make is that by increasing the amount of data available for consumers to read, thus reducing ignorance as close to nil as possible, we are actually eroding the ability of people to make conscious, self-determined choices based on what they prefer. Instead, it influences people to choose the "correct" option (correct meaning that the data says that option A is more optimal than option B, and only idiots would prefer a less-optimal solution). And if we choose the "correct" option every time, how long before that becomes the only option?
It's the expansion of the "Nanny" state. Essentially, the government trying to intimidate or coerce people into making a healthy decision for their own good. Yes, posting the calorie count is an objective act. People are free to read the number and then decide for themselves. But it's the issue that the "Government" is forcing businesses to reveal calorie count in the name of trying to create a more healthy society, and thus subtly impinging on a person's ability to make a choice for good or ill.
Personally I view it as protecting the right to sin. We have to have free choice, which means we have to have the right to be able to freely choose what is wrong for both us and society. If we take away the right to choose what's wrong for us, then we begin to remove what makes us unique and individual. Doesn't mean we're immune to the consequences, but we must have the ability to choose. Like abortion: no matter how horrific the practice may be in its extremes, or how morally abhorrent the practice may be, we MUST allow women the right to choose. Otherwise we run the risk of creating a benevolent tyranny that seeks to protect us from ourselves--and a benevolent tyranny is still tyranny.
There would be no more heroes, and no more villains. Stories would be told about cooperation against implacable obstacles and overcoming overwhelming odds. There would be no deviation from the norm because good would 'be' the norm. For that matter, there would be no more free will, or choice. Only totally rational automatons always cooperating together, no matter what. There would be no more right, no more wrong. There would be only ONE mind, one ideology because without wrongness, without evil there would be no variation.
Someone correct me on this if I'm wrong, but wasn't Paul (or one of the anonymous authors writing under the Paul psuedonym) responsible for the decree that priests of the Catholic Church be celibate in order to focus their energies on God?
We had the kind of justice system you describe in place for most of recorded human history. The Romans crucified hundreds of thousands over their thousand year reign, the Janissaries of the Caliphate used to drop prisoners onto large spikes and impale them while alive as a warning to others, and so on and so forth. People still committed crimes. All you're advocating is reforming the system to provide immense personal satisfaction and vengeance to the wronged, rather than actual penance and rehabilitation.
Damn it all RockoTDF, here I went and outdid myself in one of my sparse trolling efforts, and not only do you repudiate me well (I had you pegged for a deterministic reductionista), you also surprisingly share many of the same opinions I do (I did as you suggested and reviewed your profile and postings) only you're more literate and educated about the subjects than I am. I hereby anoint myself for the rest of the day as a world-class asshole who made a gigantic error in judgment in choosing you to troll. My job (that of being an intentional douche-bag) is done, and I'm going to go retreat under my bridge and lick my wounds.
I'm just curious, did you miss the part in the article where Pfizer invested $1B and had 25,000 volunteers with an entire research team dedicated to torcetrapib, following all appropriate research protocols? Now, I'm sure you're a flawless genius who gets research protocols right every time all the time and thus has standing to criticize a giant of the pharmaceutical industry, but I'm also willing to venture a guess that $1B, a dedicated corporate research team, and 25,000 volunteers gets some pretty decent results, plus properly-set up control and empirical groups.
No, I'm pretty sure (and here's where I'm going to get personally insulting and troll you, so please take notice) you're a strong believer in the reductionable determinism of the universe. You probably believe that Truth is objective, and that any and all problems can be solved by science given enough time, resources, and protocols. You probably believe that Error is first and foremost a product of faulty ill-disciplined minds, and that with enough attention and self-discipline Error can be eliminated from existence. And you probably also believe that we don't have souls and that we're just a bunch of biological automatons running on complex whorls of instinctual-based wetware who can be programmed and re-programmed at whim. Am I stinging yet? No, probably not. But here's where I am going to sting you: You're wrong. This article wasn't about inappropriate research protocols and projects being undertaken by highly paid idiots, this is a meditation on the nature of error and how our understanding of causality is flawed due to emphasis on deterministic, reductionable dogma spouted by idiots like yourself (and trust me sir, you ARE an idiot) who believe that everything can be predicted, measured, and known, and that we're all just mindless automatons groping in the endless dark. YOU are too attached to your idea of determinism and reductionism and that everything can be guessed, and so you fired off an emotional objection in which you masqueraded opinions as fact and TOLD A STORY about what you think happened (asserting it as Truth) rather than what actually did happen. And that is why YOU, sir, and others who spout similar dogmatic attitudes to yours are idiots of the finest caliber.
and yes, it was worth the emotional expenditure to troll you for just a second. Now please, laugh at me, shrug off my little attempt and rationalize it, then go back to being a mindless automaton with illusions of sentience and output your data in your meaningless life--which will soon end with extinction of your consciousness (and those of everyone you've ever cared about).
I challenge you to read Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz, and then come back to your statement. OP is right: we will NEVER be able to solve everything. It's wrong-facing Turtles all the way down.
Geekoid, the point you are missing is that for thousands of years Man has said what you said: "In fact, it seems likely, based on how much we know in the very short time..." etc. You are ignoring completely the nature of error itself, in that any definition or system we come up with is going to be Wrong on some level at some point, and therefore we are always going to be learning more and more. There is no objective Truth, and reality is not completely reductive,
For instance, you might tell me that mathematics is a pure system without flaw and that we've figured it out entirely. I would rebut with the fact that we've based our entire mathematical system around base 10, and base 10 has it's own flaws: one of which is Pi. Pi, in base 10, cannot ever be calculated out.
The point of this article was to attack those who believe that all answers can be discovered given enough time, resources, and application of proper scientific rigor and principle to a given issue. All the scientific process does is show us how to reduce a given problem into its components and understand how they work in conjunction. It works exceptionally well, but it is not perfect, and it does not necessarily scale upward.
Dude, based on how you keep that level of meticulous tracking of your food and calorie intakes, I'd also say you have an eating disorder.
What brain, Elrous0? You don't have one! You're just a distributed hive entity consisting of the ganglion of harvested lobsters that have been reconstituted into a virtual matrix and then forced to run on a Pentium II with about 500 MBs of RAM.