disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low
That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.
God isn't responsible for inflicting ills. Satan is responsible for it; God allows it to happen.
This is sophistry. Here's what happens: Satan approaches God. God says, "What do ya think of Job? Good guy, huh?" Satan says, "He only acts good because you're nice to him. Let me beat the crap out of him and kill his family. Then we'll see whether he's still a nice guy to you." God says, "Sure! Sounds like a great bet."
Not only does God allow the torture of one of his most devout followers (as well as the killing of all of his livestock and family), but he even has a kind of bet going on with Satan about how long Job can hang on. Since God clearly has all the power here (I'd think of him sort of like a mafia boss in this story), what he says and what he allows goes. Claiming that Satan is fully responsible is a little ridiculous, and even if he was, who created Satan again? Who gave Satan the power to do these evil things?
And when poor ole Job has the audacity to say, "Gee Whiz, God, I'm having a pretty crappy day," God just yells down and says, "Ya don't understand! I got stuff to do. Creator stuff. Important stuff. Are YOU questioning my judgment? I got stuff to do -- like making random bets with Satan about what you'd do if someone beat the crap out of you."
See chapter 11 of "What Does the Bible Really Teach?" for one denomination's view of the problem of evil.
As I said in my previous posts, there are many theological perspectives on how to deal with the problem of evil. In fact, they are so common that there is a specific term for them: theodicy.
If God wanted robots, he would have made robots. Instead, he wanted creatures who sincerely love him back, so he made creatures capable of acting on free will.
Yes, this is one solution, and a common one. But this solution generally does not deny that God is the ultimate creator of evil (which is what my posts were responding to). After all, not only did he make these "creatures" with free will, but he placed a tree in a garden that would educate them on how to do evil. And then a serpent (which God also presumably created at some point) comes along and gets the creatures to learn about evil from the tree.
But I don't think the story told in your link is a great analogy. For one, God isn't a teacher trying to maintain control of a classroom -- he's supposed to be a supreme being with unlimited power. If that's true, the logic of limited beings like teachers probably shouldn't apply.
And second, the teacher story seems to ignore the fact that God gave Adam and Eve a tree to teach them about evil. It's not like a teacher dealing with a random rebellious student -- it's more like a teacher who gives a couple students a naughty book, but tells them NOT to read it, and then when they bring it to class and try to disrupt things with it, he does actually cast them out of the classroom, curses the womb of the woman and gives her pain in childbirth, etc.... all to teach a lesson to others.
I'm not going to debate this issue further, because that was not the point of my posts -- I was merely pointing out that the problem of evil actually does exist, and historically it has worried a lot of Christians.
A single person (Nader) dropping out would likely have changed enough votes to matter.
By the way, you also don't know this. If you went back in time, had Nader drop out months or even a year before the election, and then ran the entire campaign through again without Nader, do you seriously think that only a couple hundred voters in Florida would be affected?
Nader's presence as a candidate caused the major candidates to act in lots of different minor ways that they might not have otherwise -- staking out positions to agree with or contrast with Nader, deciding where to runs ads, where to visit, how much to spend, etc. in various places based on how Nader might affect the vote in some states.
Was Nader the top worry in either the Bush or Gore campaign? Probably not. But they were aware of him, and his presence influenced their actions. Given the small margin of error, I seriously doubt you could predict how things may have been different without Nader. That's a MAJOR change to the election.
On the other hand, I'm reasonably certain that Gore could have just campaigned a little harder, made a few different statements or promises to some Floridians, and managed to get a couple hundred Democrats not to defect from him... he probably could have done that with a single targeted campaign stop, if he knew ahead of time that it would matter.
You're advocating a relatively HUGE change to history, and you can't even guarantee what the outcome would have been otherwise. I'm pretty sure Gore had a multitude of incredibly tiny things he could have done that would have the same impact, had he known what it would come down to.
There's likely no single action by any single person that would have prevented those Democrats from voting for Bush.
Gore would have only needed to win a couple hundred votes out of about 200,000 Democrats who swung to Bush.
Are you seriously arguing that there is no single action that one of the two major candidates could have taken that might have swayed 0.1% of swing-voting Democrats in Florida?
If so, you should probably hire yourself out as a political consultant, because campaigns would be interested to know that no matter what action they take, they can't influence even as many as 0.1% of swing voters in their own party.
Thank you for spending all that time getting around the fact that scripture is what matters to people that believe
Given your use of terms, I'm going to assume you're arguing from a Christian (and not Judaic) position.
The sola scriptura doctrine was not particularly strong until the Reformation, when Martin Luther championed it. For most of the history of the church, and still in the Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant Churches (Episicopal, Methodist, etc.), church tradition has also been an essential source for understanding Christianity. There has been a very strong tradition of the smartest Christian theologians debating the "Problem of Evil" for all of church history. (For the record, the rabbinical tradition in Judaism has done similar things.)
Whether YOU think it's a problem or not is irrelevant. Perhaps in whatever branch of Christianity you believe in, it isn't perceived to be a problem. Fine. But for the vast majority of Christian theologians throughout history, it was something that merited significant discussion.
and you couldn't come up with a single verse to back up God making Evil or the Bible saying God is responsible for everything. Good job.
It's not my job to educate you on the basics of your religion. Nor is it my job to READ for you -- did you even look at the links I gave in my post?
If you skimmed the "Problem of Evil" article, you'd discover that there are in fact parts of the Bible that many people have interpreted to imply that God is the ultimate source of Evil.
The most obvious example (discussed in the link) is the entire book of Job, where God is the one responsible for inflicting all manner of bad acts upon Job's family. When Job -- who according to scripture itself, did nothing wrong to deserve this -- dares to question God's plan, God just yells at him from a whirlwind for a while, saying essentially, "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the world??" Implication: You have no concept of how great my power is or why I need to wield it in certain ways. And if I decide to inflict evil into the world, or even on you and your family, that's my business... you can't hope to understand why.
Again, just going on sources mentioned in my link, another common passage discussed is Isaiah 45:7: "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things." And there are plenty more verses that other theologians have discussed in this context.
And please note that I'm not the one interpreting these passages to imply that God created evil -- it's many Christian theologians who debate these points. I wouldn't presume to interpret the Bible for you, but you have to acknowledge that a lot of smart Christians -- who probably know a lot more about the Bible than you do -- have seen problems here.
By the way, you're the one skirting the logical problem here, which is perhaps what troubled Christian philosophers the most. Regardless of what scripture says, if a Christian believes in an all-powerful and all-knowing God, that God should have the power to create good things. For some reason, he chose to create humans that could also do evil. From scripture, it seems implied that he created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the book of Genesis, so it appears he even made it possible for humans to acquire the knowledge to do evil. (Of course, in the story, Satan is involved in this acquisition, but most Christian theologians acknowledge that Satan too much have been created by the all-powerful God, so that tempting toward evil must also have ultimately been part of God's creation.) Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, and presumably all-good God choose to create beings that MIGHT do evil?
"The Problem of Evil" is a major theological conundrum that philosophers have debated for centuries. The fact that you think you solved it in a couple sentences speaks of great ignorance and great arrogance.
"The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer." Kindly wish to back that up? Simply repeating ignorant arguments that you've heard like a parrot is meaningless.
Let's stick to the scriptures of these religions, for the sake of argument (since that's essentially how this thread got started, with someone posting a critique of Islamic scripture).
It's pretty clear that theologians in each of these religions have debated the internal consistency of their scriptures for thousands of years. They've come up with various solutions, but the fact is that the most learned scholars of Christianity and Judaism clearly recognize that their own scriptures have apparent flaws when read at face value... and they've spent considerable time and effort to reconcile them.
So, aside from GP's use of the term "mythologies" (which can be offensive to believers), I don't get how he's wrong. Scholars of these religions themselves recognize that their own scriptures don't quite make sense until you figure out how to make them make sense... which usually means you're already a believer in that religion to go to that trouble.
Including your next bit of ignorance:
"When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly."
Where does the Bible say that God created EVERYTHING including the acts of men who were given free will to make their own choices? I'm not here to argue for or against anything but allowing stupid people to get away with saying stupid things.
Umm, again, there are literally thousands of years of Jewish and Christian theologians who have debated the Problem of Evil.
If it was readily apparent that "evil" came from ?? (some other source outside of Creation, which is supposed to be all there is), while God made everything else, I doubt that the most learned folks in Christianity and Judaism would spend millennia trying to figure this problem out.
Of course you feel it doesn't make any sense. Regardless of its own merits you seem to lack the intelligence to even know what it says, much less make a judgment on its contents.
Given that the GP seems aware of conflicts in Christianity and Judaism that go back thousands of years, while you seem to be incredibly ignorant of the philosophical history of the religions you're trying to defend, I don't think you should be pontificating about the "lack of intelligence" in others.
There are *numerous* differences between Islam and the Torah & Christianity. The evil warlord Mohammed used Arian Christian heretics to base some of the superstiton in the Qur'an on
WOAH -- with that sort of rhetoric, it's pretty reasonable to assume you're a Christian or Jewish troll debunking Islam while pretending to be an atheist. (Or, if you're really not either, you need to reconsider the implicit respect you seem to give to the Torah & Christianity while throwing out such vitriol against other things.)
Here, please allow me to enlighten you with numerous additional sources that show that the Qur'an is not the direct and eternal word of God
And I can provide you with numerous apparent contradictions from the Torah and New Testament that seem just as bad. (Scholars of Christianity and Judaism of course don't think they're bad, just like Muslims don't notice their own apparent contradictions.)
(another bold yet provably false claim, even when you don't consider the Sa'ana Qur'an), because it is plagarised from material written 500 - 1000 years earlier, gets it wrong,
Lots of the New Testament gospels are reinterpretations of Hebrew scripture written hundreds of years before. Many Jewish scholars would say that the New Testament glosses on the Torah get a lot of things wrong.
and then throws in a bunch of anti-scientific stuff to boot (that is, modern science *proves* statements in the Qur'an to be *false* - its claim to be *perfect* is simply rubbish):
Because there isn't ANYTHING in the Torah or New Testament which seems to go against science... [/sarcasm]... Creation myths, worldwide floods, creating food from nothing, floating axheads, sun standing still, and... of course... multiple stories of resurrection from the dead are just a few things that come to mind.
Now, you can choose to believe in an anti-scientific falsehood if you like. I'd rather not. It is clear that Islam makes many claims. Upon close examination those claims are *simply not true*.
Again, I'm not getting what's different hear from those who would criticize Christianity or Judaism. (No offense to any believers at all intended, but these are criticisms that could be leveled at any of these religions by those outside of them.)
You can deny the sources I've given, but that is simply denial of reality because you would rather cling to the lie of the mythology you were born into.
Huh? By the way, some of your sources are pretty darn generic links to vast resources...
Making that choice is perfectly valid, (although stupid in the 21st Century, IMHO) - you just have to understand that you are choosing to deny all the evidence that shows the various claims of your superstition as false.
I don't see that in the GP's comment at all. He was pointing out that ALL of the religions you mention appear to have these flaws. ALL of them have apparent self-contradictions and superstitious elements. To claim this is only true of Islam and not Christianity or Judaism is just deluding yourself.
Fortunately, as the wikiislam site shows, many people are realising the falsehood of religions and choosing to live a Free People (not slaves under Islam) and having to be virtuous because they want to be - not because they fear the nightmares of Bronze Age desert barbarians.
I don't get it. Why, if you're such a "free thinker," do you believe that Islamic texts are somehow "worse" than Christian or Judaic texts? If you doubt all religions, surely you must recognize that the same criticisms are true of all these.
Your specific targeting of Islam suggests a larger agenda, and from your earlier link to a site that critiques Islam from a Christian perspective suggests that something else is going on in your posts here.
The problem is that they have no way to know that they are losing customers, so they have no motivation to change their behavior.
Well, first, if they lose enough customers, they actually will notice.
But even if they don't, it's not like you're helpless here. You can actually contact them through a number of different channels and say, "I just want to let you know that I used to be a major customer, but I will no longer buy from you because of X." If a company starts receiving hundreds or thousands of messages like that about some issue, there is at least a chance that they might think about their behavior. Of course, they may just think that they're big enough and the new policy is important enough that they won't.
But if you appreciated the quality of their products before, the least you could do as a former loyal customer is tell them what they did wrong. Then they can choose whether to act (or not) on that behavior.
I've even on occasion done this in person. Did your favorite restaurant make a policy change that makes it less economical for you to eat there, or one that significantly affects the quality to you? Well, you can either just not go there again, and the owner gets to wonder about what happened... or you can give them some feedback and say, "This is important to me, and I'm letting you know that you won't see me much anymore if this is the new policy." Just be polite, and they can do what they want with that information. At a minimum, if you're polite, and the owner knows you're a regular customer, you might get a couple free meals or something... or they might get defensive, and you just politely say, "Well, I thought I'd let you know" and leave quietly.
A lot of people seem to be taught that "if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all." In general, that might be the polite way to go. But when you're dealing with someone's business as a regular customer, and then you suddenly decide to leave, it's actually more polite and potentially useful to give them feedback about why.
Even if X is often correlated with Y, it doesn't justify the assumption that X always implies Y.
While that is true, the safe bet is still going to be that X implies Y.
That is absolutely false. Particularly since in this case we have examples of not-X that have Y, it may in fact be that Y implies X, but only in some cases, or even that there is no causality at all between X and Y.
I personally don't have statistics about the incidence of "laziness" and "failure to attempt to follow doctor's advice" in non-obese patients. Do you? I'm guessing that it is probably higher in obese patients, but I don't know that.
Obesity is easy to spot. Doctors who see obese patients and recommend that they lose weight can easily tell if those patients aren't successful in following their advice (though, whether the patient actually tried and how hard they may have tried is less easy to evaluate).
On the other hand, for non-obese patients, doctors might recommend a better diet and more exercise to lots of them too. Short of major changes in blood indicators or something, how do they actually know if the patients complied?
Thus, it's pretty hard to have good data about compliance for non-obese patients, or the incidence of "laziness" among them in conforming to medical recommendations. Whereas doctors can easily make assumptions about obese patients who don't slim down, thus giving the appearance of greater incidence.
Now, if we had some clear cases where X doesn't lead to Y, for example when Z is present, then we can solve the problem of unfairly expecting Y by also looking for Z. Hunting for Z will probably be more fruitful in the long run than trying to train people to ignore stereotypes that have evidentiary support.
Maybe. Except your reasoning doesn't take into account the possibility of confounding variables. It could be that X doesn't lead to Y at all, and actually Z is the cause of both X and Y.
In the present case, for example, since there are lazy people and people who don't follow medical advice who aren't obese, perhaps we might be better off searching for commonalities between all lazy people, since they are the actual problem for medical treatment -- rather than searching for exceptions to a stereotype. Maybe there are questions that could be asked in a questionnaire or interview that would give greater insight into whether a patient might be likely to listen to a doctor's advice, and perhaps even whether there might be better strategies. I don't know. But that would be a reasonable place to start.
However, one strategy that does NOT seem fruitful is just to continue to assume that the only people who can't hide their inability to comply are the only ones not listening to doctors... and the reason for that is because they're lazy fat bastards.
*Are* they less likely to follow treatment plans? It stands to reason that someone who won't do what's necessary for his health in one area might be less likely to do so in another area as well.
Studies have shown that the most common assumption is that fat people are lazy, undisciplined, unwilling to work hard, etc. -- not just in terms of health choices. Your comment is playing directly into that bias.
I think this bias, like most, actually does have some relationship to reality -- i.e., a greater percentage of fat people are likely to have these traits than others.
HOWEVER -- pre-judging an individual on the basis of a single characteristic is the very definition of "bias."
Even if 90% of obese people are lazy bastards who won't even try to listen to their doctor's advice (and I don't think the number is that high), that does not excuse a doctor who provides inferior treatment to the other 10% because of assumptions.
If the doctors' assumption is accurate, it's not bias in the sense implied.
That's like saying -- If a black person is driving around a rich neighborhood, he must be looking to steal something -- because "black people are more likely to commit crimes" is an "accurate" statistic.
Even if X is often correlated with Y, it doesn't justify the assumption that X always implies Y. When dealing with healthcare, these sorts of assumptions can literally be deadly, such as when a physician fails to search for secondary contributory causes of obesity in a particular patient because the assumption is just that the patient must be a lazy bastard who can't follow directions.
So, obesity saves more than 10% of lifetime healthcare cost.
Yes, exactly. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. A lot of people develop chronic diseases that require intensive care late in life, whether it's due to diabetes in middle-aged fat people or dementia and various cancers in retired elderly "healthy" people. So, overall, the best way to reduce costs is to get people to die off earlier.
And these figures are probably even worse because they only take into account healthcare costs, without considering lifetime contributions to healthcare.
As I recall from this study, on average the years "lost" due to obese people dying earlier are mostly during retirement: obese life expectancy was reduced from 84 to 80 years or so. (Obviously there are people who have heart attacks and die in their 40s or 50s too, but this is the average.)
If an obese person and a normal weight person both retire around age 65, the greatest drain on societal resources will occur after that. If the average retirement time is reduced by 25% or so (which is suggested by the study), that's an even greater effective reduction because it occurs while the person is often contributing the least toward the healthcare system. It's the otherwise "healthy" person who lives to 95 or 100 and spends the last 10-15 years with a major degenerative illness that really costs a lot to society overall; almost half of their adult life is spent "in retirement" and probably not contributing as actively to healthcare costs.
If the U.S. government actually wanted to save healthcare costs overall, they would have adopted an official diet plan that tends to make people fat back when the Baby Boomers were younger. And they would have subsidized food production through farm bills and additives in manufacture that would make people fatter.
Oh, wait... they actually did that starting in the 1970s! Maybe the government actually is developing policy to save healthcare costs: just trying to save money by getting fat Baby Boomers to die earlier??
It's not a bias if you see the same patient in clinic every few months for years and they continue to gain weight and ignore your recommendations.
If an otherwise healthy obese patient comes to see you for years and this is true, you're right -- it's not a bias.
However, it is a bias if:
You assume every fat person who walks into your office is the same.
You assume that the cause of obesity is the same in all such patients.
You fail to look for other causes of obesity, including physical problems or mental problems, instead assuming you just need to tell them to "lose weight" and come up with a diet plan. Perhaps there is an underlying cause -- particularly mental -- whose treatment would be helpful.
You ignore other complaints about other symptoms or don't spend enough time talking about other problems the patient actually has (some of which might possible be unrelated to weight), and instead use excessive time during office visits to give them the same stock advice about weight.
You fail to look into other medical problems a patient has that significantly affect their quality of life (and solutions to them) because you decide that the weight problem must be dealt with first or is more significant in your opinion... even if these other problems may be treatable or even unrelated to weight.
In sum, if you end up giving worse care to overweight patients, you are exhibiting a bias. And since studies have shown that overweight people do seem to get worse care a lot of the time, it is an issue in the medical profession.
"anti-fat stigma is so prevalent and a significant barrier to the treatment of obesity"
Being fat-positive would help with the treatment of obesity?
No. But harboring anti-fat biases can inhibit effective treatment.
Numerous studies have shown that people with biases against fat people make lots of assumptions -- fat people are lazy, undisciplined, lack willpower, etc. In many (and possibly most) cases, this may be true.
On the other hand, lots of fat people have other medical issues that contribute to their obesity. Others have factors like mental illness and clinical depression.
If a doctor assumes that a person is fat simply because he's biased to think that fat people are fat because they are lazy and lack willpower, that will significantly affect treatment options. It may cause him not to look harder for possible underlying causes or lifestyle factors -- and treating those underlying causes might actually help the person to solve the obesity problem... rather than just assuming that all you need to do is say, "You need to eat less. Be disciplined about it."
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
I know the common reply here is simply, "Find another job if you don't like it." And that's one possibility, but not feasible for many people.
Do you know what fixed unreasonable working conditions in the past? Collective bargaining. If you're afraid of sticking your neck out there by talking to HR and your boss about how you're being treated, get together a group of your coworkers and do it together.
Do they want people on-call on three-day weekends? Fine -- pay you to be on-call. Do they want ridiculous amounts of overtime to meet "unreasonable deadlines"? Fine -- pay you bonuses for that overtime to meet special deadlines.
If you have reasonable requests, and a lot of your coworkers feel the same way, you can probably negotiate some changes. You shouldn't feel like your job is on the line if you can't commit to doing overtime whenever asked and coming in over holiday weekends whenever is convenient. Unless you're mid-level management or above, you probably don't get paid enough to deal with that sort of crap.
On the other hand, a lot of tech companies in the past couple decades seem to have developed some sort of crazy work ethic where you have a bunch of guys all under 35, with no lives, who are willing to work 80 per week all the time. I know a few guys who thrive on this sort of thing -- they just seem to keep looking for jobs that will punish them like that.
If all of your coworkers are like that, then your only recourse probably is to find a new job to improve working conditions. But if you spend your lunchtime complaining about these things with your coworkers, you can probably work to change it.
(Of course, this is all assuming that your company isn't ready to fire all of you and outsource the work to India. But if you and your coworkers are actually doing good work in your positions, that scenario is unlikely.)
Aesthetics, comfort, feel, ease of use, reliability, compatibility and many factors all play a part as to what price a customer will pay. Some people care about function, some care about form and most want some mixture of both.
I think you completely missed the point of GP's post. There may be various aspects of "utility" (and even "competition") that involve all these things. "Utility" doesn't always just mean "useful in some basic functional way." It can also refer to what is "useful" to you, which might include things like comfort, ease of use, reliability, compatibility, etc. All of these things can make a product much more "useful" for a given person and therefore can be part of "utility" overall.
GP's point was simply that people don't generally care about the cost of actually making a product as a big factor. In some situations, a markup of only 5-10% over the cost of production is about the all the profit producers can expect, while for other products the standard markup might be 1000% or even 2000% over the cost of manufacture. Consumers mostly judge price based on relative costs for similar products, as well as actual perceived differences (including "utility" in all possible forms, as well as aesthetics, etc., which I don't think was deliberately left out by GP). They just don't tend to care a lot about cost of manufacture, unless that's somehow brought to their attention (and no manufacturers generally do that, because it can only work against both them and their competitors).
I say the following as someone who really loves the metric system.
Ah but it is broken. For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit which is then further compounded by the fact that there are 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint and only 16 in a US pint.
This only matters when one has to do conversion between these units. For most people in their everyday lives, this is completely IRRELEVANT. Unless you're an international traveler or are importing some substance measured by volume, why the heck would you care how they measure in the UK?
However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass?
99.9% of Americans have absolutely no use for this distinction in their daily lives.
And I say this as someone who took a lot of engineering courses where we were required to understand and make use of imperial units, if nothing else other than to make use of old books and tables -- complaining about minor differences like ounces in a pint or the difference between lb-force and lb-mass is nothing compared to doing fluid dynamics, mechanics courses, and chemistry courses using imperial units (atm-cu.ft./lb.-mol-degreeR anyone?).
There are STRONG arguments why science and engineering people -- who deal with unit conversions everyday -- benefit from metric, and almost all of them do use metric already. However, 99% of Americans don't need to do these things in everyday life, so why should they care? To them, the system is NOT broken.
If that's still not enough to convince you that there is a problem then consider that there are only three countries in the world still using the old imperial-based system: Liberia, Burma and the USA.
I think that's a great argument, and the best one you've given for the everyday person who might consider traveling internationally. For Americans who don't, though, it's not actually a "broken" system for them. I wish they would switch -- but for most people in most situations, it is a solution in search of a problem.
I agree that we should have L/100km (or gallons/100 miles) as well as km/L or MPG. However...
Where L/100km makes an infinite amount of sense is when comparing the fuel efficiency of different vehicles. What is better, upgrading a 35mpg car to 42mpg, or upgrading a 15mpg SUV to one that gets 20mpg?
No -- in this case, you're not "comparing the fuel efficiency of different vehicles." You're comparing the net gain by two different upgrades to two different vehicles.
In other words, there are at least FOUR vehicles involved in this comparison. I always hear this exact example trotted out whenever someone starts arguing for L/100km or gal/100mi, but I honestly wonder how common this particular problem is.
Let's look at the things that have to be true for this scenario to actually be relevant to a car shopper, with at least two vehicles (most shoppers don't even have two or more vehicles to consider upgrading to begin with):
The shopper must have two vehicles, both of which he/she is somewhat unsatisfied with enough to consider changing at the same time.
The old vehicles must have been used similar amounts and driven similar distances, and the shopper must plan to do the same with the new ones.
The upgrade is optional for both vehicles (i.e., neither one is dying soon), or else the shopper wouldn't have a choice about which to upgrade.
The shopper must be on a budget enough to restrict them to only one upgrade at once.
The shopper's budget must also be flexible enough to allow an upgrade on either of the two vehicles, even though upgrade costs might vary significantly depending on the type/size/quality of both vehicles.
The shopper plans to upgrade both vehicles to newer vehicles in a similar class (or at least which have similar fuel efficiency); otherwise, it's probably not really an actual "upgrade" comparison and differences could be reasonably apparent even with km/L or MPG.
etc.
I just don't think these particular comparison scenarios are that likely. Even the idea that a shopper has two vehicles ready to upgrade, neither of which SHOULD be upgraded (because of age, condition, etc.), and both vehicles are driven the same distances all the time is just such a rare occurrence that I can't imagine such a comparison is actually useful that often.
When they do occur, most of them could be solved simply by knowing approximately that lower MPG or km/L vehicles are really inefficient and it usually makes sense to make any small improvement to a regularly used one can before worrying too much about more efficent vehicles.
The fundamental reality here is that for most people, the only time they ever look at the fuel efficiency figures is when they're shopping for a new vehicle.
Frankly, I don't think think anyone but diehard environmentalists or some sort of mechanics interested in optimization give a damn about actual "fuel efficiency" in the abstract.
Most people care about the practical impact on their driving. Measuring in L/100km or Gal/100mi is useful for people whose driving distances are relatively constant, like commuters who drive every day. They can clearly see by what percentage their fuel bill would go up or down for constant distance. Measuring in km/L or MPG is more useful for people whose gas budget is relatively constant and want to know how much farther they might be able to drive (whether to take a new job that would require a longer commute or because they plan to use the vehicle irregularly for trips or random drives).
Many people live on limited budgets, and for them, MPG or km/L will actually tell them how much farther their car can travel with their same fuel budget. That's useful information too.
Again, I personally think BOTH measurements should be displayed, if for no other reason than that L/100km and gal/100mi show how truly bad the wors
I don't think anyone who really appreciates coffee prefers pod coffee.
Unless you have some sort of magic way of judging if someone really appreciates coffee, it is being condescending, just like audiophiles or wine snobs in their respective fields of "expertise".
Thanks for this. I completely agree. People who make statements like, "anyone who really appreciates X must understand the value of Y" generally haven't realized that our whole cultural value system is just constructed. Certain "lore" becomes accepted. Despite the fact that a whole generation of people are growing up who actually prefer the constrainted sound of mp3s and multiple scientific studies have shown that wine "experts" can't generally tell the difference between supposedly "great" wines and mediocre ones at a rate above chance, the audio and wine snobs keep up their rhetoric as the people "in the know" who should determine "what is best" for all of us.
I personally think the freshly made coffee at some local coffee shops tastes better than anything I've ever brewed myself and a lot better than any coffee I've ever had made from a pod or K-cup. But that's my opinion, and I'm not going to judge you for yours.
On a more extreme scale, some people do like Big Macs better than some "gourmet" hamburger made at a fancy restaurant, or they might like Kraft mac & cheese better than many homemade baked varieties. I really don't think anyone should have to apologize for their tastes -- and for the Big Mac afficionado, they may actually know that some McDonalds restaurants make better tasting ones than others.
People like what they like. And I don't think someone should have to try to justify his or her experience. It's okay to like coffee made from a pod, and it's even okay to like some kind of dinner made from a box. (Whether any of this is "healthy" or "healthier" is a separate question -- I'm just talking about taste and enjoyment.)
Many people just feel somehow justified when their opinions mesh with the so-called "experts."
So where can I buy pre-prepared heat-and-eat healthy meals?
Oh, I don't know -- some local hippy supermarket that will charge you a ridiculous amount of money? Yes, you can probably buy healthy heat-and-eat meals, but it will cost you.
But why would you do that when you can have a lot more choice if you take minimal effort to do it yourself? In about the same amount of time it will take you to use the microwave or toaster oven to heat up your prepared dinner, you could probably make something yourself.
Most "TV dinners" are so loaded with sugar that I can't touch them,
If you're just looking for "better than TV dinners," that's pretty easy.
and spending the time to develop ancient and esoteric skills like "blacksmithing" or "cooking" aren't high up my list of hobbies this year.
You just need to buy some separate ingredients, and maybe look for one of those easy cookbooks with a title like "Easy one-dish meals" or something. With a couple cans and some frozen stuff, you can probably cut prep time down to a few minutes per meal. It's hardly rocket science to throw a few ingredients into a pot, stir, and heat.
Now, is this the best option? Of course not. But I'm sure with just a little experimentation and a decent cookbook, you'll pretty quickly figure out a dozen or more easy dishes you can throw together without even thinking. And by building your own dish from a few separate ingredients, you have a lot more control over your food already than with a packaged frozen TV dinner -- and you can get rid of the excess sugar and other bad stuff, not to mention choosing ingredients you like and making the dish taste better for you.
Heck, if you start doing this, you might even realize that it's pretty darn easy to cook at a basic level. You might even start buying fresh ingredients, figure out how to chop vegetables almost as fast as you could open a can or heat the bag from the freezer, etc. And then you'll be eating stuff that's a LOT more healthy than the frozen dinners.
But if you just throw up your hands and say, "It's too hard!", well, I don't know what to say. Your body is literally made out of what you eat. Making some minimal investment of 10 minutes per day or whatever in food preparation can probably have a much greater impact on your general quality of life than most things you could do. You don't have to take up cooking as a "hobby" and spend your weekend designing elaborate five-course dinners -- but I'd like to think that some people might have a vague utilitarian interest in putting better stuff into their bodies... enough to invest a few minutes per day.
Crops that are grown without herbicides etc. obviously can not be tainted by them, did you miss this?
GP didn't.
So how do you come to the idea that every food is contaminated by them?
I'm pretty sure GP isn't talking about "contamination." There are loads of "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal things that are part of human agriculture, long before modern "chemicals" were used for this process. Farmers for thousands of years gradually figured out practices that would grow fewer weeds while increasing yield.
The plants evolved along with this -- and farmers selected the ones that could outcompete and even actively resist weeds and fungi, because those were the crops that did the best.
There was a lot of "natural" genetic engineering going on in selective breeding, and "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal outcomes that were created by farming techniques -- soil preparation, time of year/frequency of planting or soil tending, etc.
In the end, all of our crops today have been inherently modified from the "natural" wild plants, so GP's point holds -- unless you're a hunter-gatherer, you are eating food that has been engineered to grow in ways that it generally wouldn't "naturally," Some part of that has to do with plants that have gradually evolved to outcompete and even discourage growth of weeds (herbicide) and resist disease (fungicide).
When I'm here at 8 o'clock at night -- I would much prefer free soda (or a pizza) to an extra $100 in my bank account.
With $100, I'm pretty sure you could order a pizza and lots of soda sent to your office, give a generous tip to the delivery guy, and still have quite a few bucks left in your bank account.
Generally speaking, "educational use" is not held to mean "so long as it's for education, do whatever you want". Educational use typically means discussion and criticism - using excerpts and passages to demonstrate a particular point, or using an example from a text.
It's important to note that the "fair use" guidelines in the U.S. are effectively the same for educational situations as they are for non-profit activities in general. It's a widely held misconception that there's some sort of "educator exception" for fair use, but there really isn't. Courts have generally recognized that fair use should be given a little more leeway in educational circumstances, but any (non-educator) person with a similar justification has effectively the same guidelines for fair use. Essentially, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes" is a factor to be considered in potential copyright violation claims, but that's all the legal guidance there is -- no specific education exception.
The ONLY significant copyright exception for educators isn't for copying at all. It's for "performance" or "display," and it used to only apply to face-to-face meetings in classrooms. That is, unlike some performance hall or something, an educator doesn't have to pay for rights to play a musical excerpt or film excerpt in class. A professor/teacher is free to put up images on a projection screen for educational purposes, without worrying about copyright protections. With the "Teach Act," this exception was expanded beyond face-to-face teaching to include "display" or "performance" through distance learning sites, as long as the sites are restricted to enrolled students (and conform to a number of other specific regulations).
Again, that exception for performance or display is the only official educational legal exception in the U.S., and it explicitly excludes textbooks, coursepacks, and other written materials that could otherwise be purchased for a class.
In general, there's really no such legal category as "educational use" in terms of actually making copies of something.
If the teacher had used fractions of the book as part of his lessons, he would likely have been covered under fair use provisions in many nations
Exactly -- under general "fair use," not necessarily specific to education. (Though again, fair use for educators is often easier to justify legally.)
(By the way, my interpretation of copyright law here is directly from the counsel's office at one of the top universities in the U.S.)
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Absolutely. I agree the rules should have been clear. I didn't mean to imply he was deliberately trying to cheat.
disqualifying someone just because they failed to win too many times is low
That's not why he was disqualified. He was disqualified because he failed to advance to the next level and then jumped over the state border to try again with the same project in another state. Without this rule, you could have kids entering a dozen different state competitions with the same project, just hoping to get the right set of judges to advance you.
God isn't responsible for inflicting ills. Satan is responsible for it; God allows it to happen.
This is sophistry. Here's what happens: Satan approaches God. God says, "What do ya think of Job? Good guy, huh?" Satan says, "He only acts good because you're nice to him. Let me beat the crap out of him and kill his family. Then we'll see whether he's still a nice guy to you." God says, "Sure! Sounds like a great bet."
Not only does God allow the torture of one of his most devout followers (as well as the killing of all of his livestock and family), but he even has a kind of bet going on with Satan about how long Job can hang on. Since God clearly has all the power here (I'd think of him sort of like a mafia boss in this story), what he says and what he allows goes. Claiming that Satan is fully responsible is a little ridiculous, and even if he was, who created Satan again? Who gave Satan the power to do these evil things?
And when poor ole Job has the audacity to say, "Gee Whiz, God, I'm having a pretty crappy day," God just yells down and says, "Ya don't understand! I got stuff to do. Creator stuff. Important stuff. Are YOU questioning my judgment? I got stuff to do -- like making random bets with Satan about what you'd do if someone beat the crap out of you."
See chapter 11 of "What Does the Bible Really Teach?" for one denomination's view of the problem of evil.
As I said in my previous posts, there are many theological perspectives on how to deal with the problem of evil. In fact, they are so common that there is a specific term for them: theodicy.
If God wanted robots, he would have made robots. Instead, he wanted creatures who sincerely love him back, so he made creatures capable of acting on free will.
Yes, this is one solution, and a common one. But this solution generally does not deny that God is the ultimate creator of evil (which is what my posts were responding to). After all, not only did he make these "creatures" with free will, but he placed a tree in a garden that would educate them on how to do evil. And then a serpent (which God also presumably created at some point) comes along and gets the creatures to learn about evil from the tree.
But I don't think the story told in your link is a great analogy. For one, God isn't a teacher trying to maintain control of a classroom -- he's supposed to be a supreme being with unlimited power. If that's true, the logic of limited beings like teachers probably shouldn't apply.
And second, the teacher story seems to ignore the fact that God gave Adam and Eve a tree to teach them about evil. It's not like a teacher dealing with a random rebellious student -- it's more like a teacher who gives a couple students a naughty book, but tells them NOT to read it, and then when they bring it to class and try to disrupt things with it, he does actually cast them out of the classroom, curses the womb of the woman and gives her pain in childbirth, etc.... all to teach a lesson to others.
I'm not going to debate this issue further, because that was not the point of my posts -- I was merely pointing out that the problem of evil actually does exist, and historically it has worried a lot of Christians.
A single person (Nader) dropping out would likely have changed enough votes to matter.
By the way, you also don't know this. If you went back in time, had Nader drop out months or even a year before the election, and then ran the entire campaign through again without Nader, do you seriously think that only a couple hundred voters in Florida would be affected?
Nader's presence as a candidate caused the major candidates to act in lots of different minor ways that they might not have otherwise -- staking out positions to agree with or contrast with Nader, deciding where to runs ads, where to visit, how much to spend, etc. in various places based on how Nader might affect the vote in some states.
Was Nader the top worry in either the Bush or Gore campaign? Probably not. But they were aware of him, and his presence influenced their actions. Given the small margin of error, I seriously doubt you could predict how things may have been different without Nader. That's a MAJOR change to the election.
On the other hand, I'm reasonably certain that Gore could have just campaigned a little harder, made a few different statements or promises to some Floridians, and managed to get a couple hundred Democrats not to defect from him... he probably could have done that with a single targeted campaign stop, if he knew ahead of time that it would matter.
You're advocating a relatively HUGE change to history, and you can't even guarantee what the outcome would have been otherwise. I'm pretty sure Gore had a multitude of incredibly tiny things he could have done that would have the same impact, had he known what it would come down to.
There's likely no single action by any single person that would have prevented those Democrats from voting for Bush.
Gore would have only needed to win a couple hundred votes out of about 200,000 Democrats who swung to Bush.
Are you seriously arguing that there is no single action that one of the two major candidates could have taken that might have swayed 0.1% of swing-voting Democrats in Florida?
If so, you should probably hire yourself out as a political consultant, because campaigns would be interested to know that no matter what action they take, they can't influence even as many as 0.1% of swing voters in their own party.
Thank you for spending all that time getting around the fact that scripture is what matters to people that believe
Given your use of terms, I'm going to assume you're arguing from a Christian (and not Judaic) position.
The sola scriptura doctrine was not particularly strong until the Reformation, when Martin Luther championed it. For most of the history of the church, and still in the Catholic, Orthodox, and many Protestant Churches (Episicopal, Methodist, etc.), church tradition has also been an essential source for understanding Christianity. There has been a very strong tradition of the smartest Christian theologians debating the "Problem of Evil" for all of church history. (For the record, the rabbinical tradition in Judaism has done similar things.)
Whether YOU think it's a problem or not is irrelevant. Perhaps in whatever branch of Christianity you believe in, it isn't perceived to be a problem. Fine. But for the vast majority of Christian theologians throughout history, it was something that merited significant discussion.
and you couldn't come up with a single verse to back up God making Evil or the Bible saying God is responsible for everything. Good job.
It's not my job to educate you on the basics of your religion. Nor is it my job to READ for you -- did you even look at the links I gave in my post?
If you skimmed the "Problem of Evil" article, you'd discover that there are in fact parts of the Bible that many people have interpreted to imply that God is the ultimate source of Evil.
The most obvious example (discussed in the link) is the entire book of Job, where God is the one responsible for inflicting all manner of bad acts upon Job's family. When Job -- who according to scripture itself, did nothing wrong to deserve this -- dares to question God's plan, God just yells at him from a whirlwind for a while, saying essentially, "Were you there when I laid the foundations of the world??" Implication: You have no concept of how great my power is or why I need to wield it in certain ways. And if I decide to inflict evil into the world, or even on you and your family, that's my business... you can't hope to understand why.
Again, just going on sources mentioned in my link, another common passage discussed is Isaiah 45:7: "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things." And there are plenty more verses that other theologians have discussed in this context.
And please note that I'm not the one interpreting these passages to imply that God created evil -- it's many Christian theologians who debate these points. I wouldn't presume to interpret the Bible for you, but you have to acknowledge that a lot of smart Christians -- who probably know a lot more about the Bible than you do -- have seen problems here.
By the way, you're the one skirting the logical problem here, which is perhaps what troubled Christian philosophers the most. Regardless of what scripture says, if a Christian believes in an all-powerful and all-knowing God, that God should have the power to create good things. For some reason, he chose to create humans that could also do evil. From scripture, it seems implied that he created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the book of Genesis, so it appears he even made it possible for humans to acquire the knowledge to do evil. (Of course, in the story, Satan is involved in this acquisition, but most Christian theologians acknowledge that Satan too much have been created by the all-powerful God, so that tempting toward evil must also have ultimately been part of God's creation.) Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing, and presumably all-good God choose to create beings that MIGHT do evil?
"The Problem of Evil" is a major theological conundrum that philosophers have debated for centuries. The fact that you think you solved it in a couple sentences speaks of great ignorance and great arrogance.
("here", not "hear"). oops.
"The problem is that none of the mythologies make any sense unless you are already a believer." Kindly wish to back that up? Simply repeating ignorant arguments that you've heard like a parrot is meaningless.
Let's stick to the scriptures of these religions, for the sake of argument (since that's essentially how this thread got started, with someone posting a critique of Islamic scripture).
It's pretty clear that theologians in each of these religions have debated the internal consistency of their scriptures for thousands of years. They've come up with various solutions, but the fact is that the most learned scholars of Christianity and Judaism clearly recognize that their own scriptures have apparent flaws when read at face value... and they've spent considerable time and effort to reconcile them.
So, aside from GP's use of the term "mythologies" (which can be offensive to believers), I don't get how he's wrong. Scholars of these religions themselves recognize that their own scriptures don't quite make sense until you figure out how to make them make sense... which usually means you're already a believer in that religion to go to that trouble.
Including your next bit of ignorance: "When you have a monotheistic religion where EVERYTHING was created by a single omnipotent, omniscient god then arguing about whether that god created "evil" or "sin" is kind of silly." Where does the Bible say that God created EVERYTHING including the acts of men who were given free will to make their own choices? I'm not here to argue for or against anything but allowing stupid people to get away with saying stupid things.
Umm, again, there are literally thousands of years of Jewish and Christian theologians who have debated the Problem of Evil.
If it was readily apparent that "evil" came from ?? (some other source outside of Creation, which is supposed to be all there is), while God made everything else, I doubt that the most learned folks in Christianity and Judaism would spend millennia trying to figure this problem out.
Of course you feel it doesn't make any sense. Regardless of its own merits you seem to lack the intelligence to even know what it says, much less make a judgment on its contents.
Given that the GP seems aware of conflicts in Christianity and Judaism that go back thousands of years, while you seem to be incredibly ignorant of the philosophical history of the religions you're trying to defend, I don't think you should be pontificating about the "lack of intelligence" in others.
There are *numerous* differences between Islam and the Torah & Christianity. The evil warlord Mohammed used Arian Christian heretics to base some of the superstiton in the Qur'an on
WOAH -- with that sort of rhetoric, it's pretty reasonable to assume you're a Christian or Jewish troll debunking Islam while pretending to be an atheist. (Or, if you're really not either, you need to reconsider the implicit respect you seem to give to the Torah & Christianity while throwing out such vitriol against other things.)
Here, please allow me to enlighten you with numerous additional sources that show that the Qur'an is not the direct and eternal word of God
And I can provide you with numerous apparent contradictions from the Torah and New Testament that seem just as bad. (Scholars of Christianity and Judaism of course don't think they're bad, just like Muslims don't notice their own apparent contradictions.)
(another bold yet provably false claim, even when you don't consider the Sa'ana Qur'an), because it is plagarised from material written 500 - 1000 years earlier, gets it wrong,
Lots of the New Testament gospels are reinterpretations of Hebrew scripture written hundreds of years before. Many Jewish scholars would say that the New Testament glosses on the Torah get a lot of things wrong.
and then throws in a bunch of anti-scientific stuff to boot (that is, modern science *proves* statements in the Qur'an to be *false* - its claim to be *perfect* is simply rubbish):
Because there isn't ANYTHING in the Torah or New Testament which seems to go against science... [/sarcasm]... Creation myths, worldwide floods, creating food from nothing, floating axheads, sun standing still, and... of course... multiple stories of resurrection from the dead are just a few things that come to mind.
Now, you can choose to believe in an anti-scientific falsehood if you like. I'd rather not. It is clear that Islam makes many claims. Upon close examination those claims are *simply not true*.
Again, I'm not getting what's different hear from those who would criticize Christianity or Judaism. (No offense to any believers at all intended, but these are criticisms that could be leveled at any of these religions by those outside of them.)
You can deny the sources I've given, but that is simply denial of reality because you would rather cling to the lie of the mythology you were born into.
Huh? By the way, some of your sources are pretty darn generic links to vast resources...
Making that choice is perfectly valid, (although stupid in the 21st Century, IMHO) - you just have to understand that you are choosing to deny all the evidence that shows the various claims of your superstition as false.
I don't see that in the GP's comment at all. He was pointing out that ALL of the religions you mention appear to have these flaws. ALL of them have apparent self-contradictions and superstitious elements. To claim this is only true of Islam and not Christianity or Judaism is just deluding yourself.
Fortunately, as the wikiislam site shows, many people are realising the falsehood of religions and choosing to live a Free People (not slaves under Islam) and having to be virtuous because they want to be - not because they fear the nightmares of Bronze Age desert barbarians.
I don't get it. Why, if you're such a "free thinker," do you believe that Islamic texts are somehow "worse" than Christian or Judaic texts? If you doubt all religions, surely you must recognize that the same criticisms are true of all these.
Your specific targeting of Islam suggests a larger agenda, and from your earlier link to a site that critiques Islam from a Christian perspective suggests that something else is going on in your posts here.
If you r
The problem is that they have no way to know that they are losing customers, so they have no motivation to change their behavior.
Well, first, if they lose enough customers, they actually will notice.
But even if they don't, it's not like you're helpless here. You can actually contact them through a number of different channels and say, "I just want to let you know that I used to be a major customer, but I will no longer buy from you because of X." If a company starts receiving hundreds or thousands of messages like that about some issue, there is at least a chance that they might think about their behavior. Of course, they may just think that they're big enough and the new policy is important enough that they won't.
But if you appreciated the quality of their products before, the least you could do as a former loyal customer is tell them what they did wrong. Then they can choose whether to act (or not) on that behavior.
I've even on occasion done this in person. Did your favorite restaurant make a policy change that makes it less economical for you to eat there, or one that significantly affects the quality to you? Well, you can either just not go there again, and the owner gets to wonder about what happened... or you can give them some feedback and say, "This is important to me, and I'm letting you know that you won't see me much anymore if this is the new policy." Just be polite, and they can do what they want with that information. At a minimum, if you're polite, and the owner knows you're a regular customer, you might get a couple free meals or something... or they might get defensive, and you just politely say, "Well, I thought I'd let you know" and leave quietly.
A lot of people seem to be taught that "if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all." In general, that might be the polite way to go. But when you're dealing with someone's business as a regular customer, and then you suddenly decide to leave, it's actually more polite and potentially useful to give them feedback about why.
Even if X is often correlated with Y, it doesn't justify the assumption that X always implies Y.
While that is true, the safe bet is still going to be that X implies Y.
That is absolutely false. Particularly since in this case we have examples of not-X that have Y, it may in fact be that Y implies X, but only in some cases, or even that there is no causality at all between X and Y.
I personally don't have statistics about the incidence of "laziness" and "failure to attempt to follow doctor's advice" in non-obese patients. Do you? I'm guessing that it is probably higher in obese patients, but I don't know that.
Obesity is easy to spot. Doctors who see obese patients and recommend that they lose weight can easily tell if those patients aren't successful in following their advice (though, whether the patient actually tried and how hard they may have tried is less easy to evaluate).
On the other hand, for non-obese patients, doctors might recommend a better diet and more exercise to lots of them too. Short of major changes in blood indicators or something, how do they actually know if the patients complied?
Thus, it's pretty hard to have good data about compliance for non-obese patients, or the incidence of "laziness" among them in conforming to medical recommendations. Whereas doctors can easily make assumptions about obese patients who don't slim down, thus giving the appearance of greater incidence.
Now, if we had some clear cases where X doesn't lead to Y, for example when Z is present, then we can solve the problem of unfairly expecting Y by also looking for Z. Hunting for Z will probably be more fruitful in the long run than trying to train people to ignore stereotypes that have evidentiary support.
Maybe. Except your reasoning doesn't take into account the possibility of confounding variables. It could be that X doesn't lead to Y at all, and actually Z is the cause of both X and Y.
In the present case, for example, since there are lazy people and people who don't follow medical advice who aren't obese, perhaps we might be better off searching for commonalities between all lazy people, since they are the actual problem for medical treatment -- rather than searching for exceptions to a stereotype. Maybe there are questions that could be asked in a questionnaire or interview that would give greater insight into whether a patient might be likely to listen to a doctor's advice, and perhaps even whether there might be better strategies. I don't know. But that would be a reasonable place to start.
However, one strategy that does NOT seem fruitful is just to continue to assume that the only people who can't hide their inability to comply are the only ones not listening to doctors... and the reason for that is because they're lazy fat bastards.
*Are* they less likely to follow treatment plans? It stands to reason that someone who won't do what's necessary for his health in one area might be less likely to do so in another area as well.
Studies have shown that the most common assumption is that fat people are lazy, undisciplined, unwilling to work hard, etc. -- not just in terms of health choices. Your comment is playing directly into that bias.
I think this bias, like most, actually does have some relationship to reality -- i.e., a greater percentage of fat people are likely to have these traits than others.
HOWEVER -- pre-judging an individual on the basis of a single characteristic is the very definition of "bias."
Even if 90% of obese people are lazy bastards who won't even try to listen to their doctor's advice (and I don't think the number is that high), that does not excuse a doctor who provides inferior treatment to the other 10% because of assumptions.
If the doctors' assumption is accurate, it's not bias in the sense implied.
That's like saying -- If a black person is driving around a rich neighborhood, he must be looking to steal something -- because "black people are more likely to commit crimes" is an "accurate" statistic.
Even if X is often correlated with Y, it doesn't justify the assumption that X always implies Y. When dealing with healthcare, these sorts of assumptions can literally be deadly, such as when a physician fails to search for secondary contributory causes of obesity in a particular patient because the assumption is just that the patient must be a lazy bastard who can't follow directions.
The lifetime costs were in Euros:
So, obesity saves more than 10% of lifetime healthcare cost.
Yes, exactly. This should be obvious to anyone with half a brain. A lot of people develop chronic diseases that require intensive care late in life, whether it's due to diabetes in middle-aged fat people or dementia and various cancers in retired elderly "healthy" people. So, overall, the best way to reduce costs is to get people to die off earlier.
And these figures are probably even worse because they only take into account healthcare costs, without considering lifetime contributions to healthcare.
As I recall from this study, on average the years "lost" due to obese people dying earlier are mostly during retirement: obese life expectancy was reduced from 84 to 80 years or so. (Obviously there are people who have heart attacks and die in their 40s or 50s too, but this is the average.)
If an obese person and a normal weight person both retire around age 65, the greatest drain on societal resources will occur after that. If the average retirement time is reduced by 25% or so (which is suggested by the study), that's an even greater effective reduction because it occurs while the person is often contributing the least toward the healthcare system. It's the otherwise "healthy" person who lives to 95 or 100 and spends the last 10-15 years with a major degenerative illness that really costs a lot to society overall; almost half of their adult life is spent "in retirement" and probably not contributing as actively to healthcare costs.
If the U.S. government actually wanted to save healthcare costs overall, they would have adopted an official diet plan that tends to make people fat back when the Baby Boomers were younger. And they would have subsidized food production through farm bills and additives in manufacture that would make people fatter.
Oh, wait... they actually did that starting in the 1970s! Maybe the government actually is developing policy to save healthcare costs: just trying to save money by getting fat Baby Boomers to die earlier??
It's not a bias if you see the same patient in clinic every few months for years and they continue to gain weight and ignore your recommendations.
If an otherwise healthy obese patient comes to see you for years and this is true, you're right -- it's not a bias.
However, it is a bias if:
In sum, if you end up giving worse care to overweight patients, you are exhibiting a bias. And since studies have shown that overweight people do seem to get worse care a lot of the time, it is an issue in the medical profession.
"anti-fat stigma is so prevalent and a significant barrier to the treatment of obesity"
Being fat-positive would help with the treatment of obesity?
No. But harboring anti-fat biases can inhibit effective treatment.
Numerous studies have shown that people with biases against fat people make lots of assumptions -- fat people are lazy, undisciplined, lack willpower, etc. In many (and possibly most) cases, this may be true.
On the other hand, lots of fat people have other medical issues that contribute to their obesity. Others have factors like mental illness and clinical depression.
If a doctor assumes that a person is fat simply because he's biased to think that fat people are fat because they are lazy and lack willpower, that will significantly affect treatment options. It may cause him not to look harder for possible underlying causes or lifestyle factors -- and treating those underlying causes might actually help the person to solve the obesity problem... rather than just assuming that all you need to do is say, "You need to eat less. Be disciplined about it."
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
I know the common reply here is simply, "Find another job if you don't like it." And that's one possibility, but not feasible for many people. Do you know what fixed unreasonable working conditions in the past? Collective bargaining. If you're afraid of sticking your neck out there by talking to HR and your boss about how you're being treated, get together a group of your coworkers and do it together.
Do they want people on-call on three-day weekends? Fine -- pay you to be on-call. Do they want ridiculous amounts of overtime to meet "unreasonable deadlines"? Fine -- pay you bonuses for that overtime to meet special deadlines.
If you have reasonable requests, and a lot of your coworkers feel the same way, you can probably negotiate some changes. You shouldn't feel like your job is on the line if you can't commit to doing overtime whenever asked and coming in over holiday weekends whenever is convenient. Unless you're mid-level management or above, you probably don't get paid enough to deal with that sort of crap.
On the other hand, a lot of tech companies in the past couple decades seem to have developed some sort of crazy work ethic where you have a bunch of guys all under 35, with no lives, who are willing to work 80 per week all the time. I know a few guys who thrive on this sort of thing -- they just seem to keep looking for jobs that will punish them like that.
If all of your coworkers are like that, then your only recourse probably is to find a new job to improve working conditions. But if you spend your lunchtime complaining about these things with your coworkers, you can probably work to change it.
(Of course, this is all assuming that your company isn't ready to fire all of you and outsource the work to India. But if you and your coworkers are actually doing good work in your positions, that scenario is unlikely.)
Aesthetics, comfort, feel, ease of use, reliability, compatibility and many factors all play a part as to what price a customer will pay. Some people care about function, some care about form and most want some mixture of both.
I think you completely missed the point of GP's post. There may be various aspects of "utility" (and even "competition") that involve all these things. "Utility" doesn't always just mean "useful in some basic functional way." It can also refer to what is "useful" to you, which might include things like comfort, ease of use, reliability, compatibility, etc. All of these things can make a product much more "useful" for a given person and therefore can be part of "utility" overall.
GP's point was simply that people don't generally care about the cost of actually making a product as a big factor. In some situations, a markup of only 5-10% over the cost of production is about the all the profit producers can expect, while for other products the standard markup might be 1000% or even 2000% over the cost of manufacture. Consumers mostly judge price based on relative costs for similar products, as well as actual perceived differences (including "utility" in all possible forms, as well as aesthetics, etc., which I don't think was deliberately left out by GP). They just don't tend to care a lot about cost of manufacture, unless that's somehow brought to their attention (and no manufacturers generally do that, because it can only work against both them and their competitors).
I say the following as someone who really loves the metric system.
Ah but it is broken. For a start there is no agreed upon standard for several of the units e.g. fluid ounce for which the Imperial unit is not the same as the US unit which is then further compounded by the fact that there are 20 fluid ounces in a UK pint and only 16 in a US pint.
This only matters when one has to do conversion between these units. For most people in their everyday lives, this is completely IRRELEVANT. Unless you're an international traveler or are importing some substance measured by volume, why the heck would you care how they measure in the UK?
However this means that the units are not clear: when you say "pound" do you mean force or mass?
99.9% of Americans have absolutely no use for this distinction in their daily lives.
And I say this as someone who took a lot of engineering courses where we were required to understand and make use of imperial units, if nothing else other than to make use of old books and tables -- complaining about minor differences like ounces in a pint or the difference between lb-force and lb-mass is nothing compared to doing fluid dynamics, mechanics courses, and chemistry courses using imperial units (atm-cu.ft./lb.-mol-degreeR anyone?).
There are STRONG arguments why science and engineering people -- who deal with unit conversions everyday -- benefit from metric, and almost all of them do use metric already. However, 99% of Americans don't need to do these things in everyday life, so why should they care? To them, the system is NOT broken.
If that's still not enough to convince you that there is a problem then consider that there are only three countries in the world still using the old imperial-based system: Liberia, Burma and the USA.
I think that's a great argument, and the best one you've given for the everyday person who might consider traveling internationally. For Americans who don't, though, it's not actually a "broken" system for them. I wish they would switch -- but for most people in most situations, it is a solution in search of a problem.
I agree that we should have L/100km (or gallons/100 miles) as well as km/L or MPG. However...
Where L/100km makes an infinite amount of sense is when comparing the fuel efficiency of different vehicles. What is better, upgrading a 35mpg car to 42mpg, or upgrading a 15mpg SUV to one that gets 20mpg?
No -- in this case, you're not "comparing the fuel efficiency of different vehicles." You're comparing the net gain by two different upgrades to two different vehicles.
In other words, there are at least FOUR vehicles involved in this comparison. I always hear this exact example trotted out whenever someone starts arguing for L/100km or gal/100mi, but I honestly wonder how common this particular problem is.
Let's look at the things that have to be true for this scenario to actually be relevant to a car shopper, with at least two vehicles (most shoppers don't even have two or more vehicles to consider upgrading to begin with):
I just don't think these particular comparison scenarios are that likely. Even the idea that a shopper has two vehicles ready to upgrade, neither of which SHOULD be upgraded (because of age, condition, etc.), and both vehicles are driven the same distances all the time is just such a rare occurrence that I can't imagine such a comparison is actually useful that often.
When they do occur, most of them could be solved simply by knowing approximately that lower MPG or km/L vehicles are really inefficient and it usually makes sense to make any small improvement to a regularly used one can before worrying too much about more efficent vehicles.
The fundamental reality here is that for most people, the only time they ever look at the fuel efficiency figures is when they're shopping for a new vehicle.
Frankly, I don't think think anyone but diehard environmentalists or some sort of mechanics interested in optimization give a damn about actual "fuel efficiency" in the abstract.
Most people care about the practical impact on their driving. Measuring in L/100km or Gal/100mi is useful for people whose driving distances are relatively constant, like commuters who drive every day. They can clearly see by what percentage their fuel bill would go up or down for constant distance. Measuring in km/L or MPG is more useful for people whose gas budget is relatively constant and want to know how much farther they might be able to drive (whether to take a new job that would require a longer commute or because they plan to use the vehicle irregularly for trips or random drives).
Many people live on limited budgets, and for them, MPG or km/L will actually tell them how much farther their car can travel with their same fuel budget. That's useful information too.
Again, I personally think BOTH measurements should be displayed, if for no other reason than that L/100km and gal/100mi show how truly bad the wors
I don't think anyone who really appreciates coffee prefers pod coffee.
Unless you have some sort of magic way of judging if someone really appreciates coffee, it is being condescending, just like audiophiles or wine snobs in their respective fields of "expertise".
Thanks for this. I completely agree. People who make statements like, "anyone who really appreciates X must understand the value of Y" generally haven't realized that our whole cultural value system is just constructed. Certain "lore" becomes accepted. Despite the fact that a whole generation of people are growing up who actually prefer the constrainted sound of mp3s and multiple scientific studies have shown that wine "experts" can't generally tell the difference between supposedly "great" wines and mediocre ones at a rate above chance, the audio and wine snobs keep up their rhetoric as the people "in the know" who should determine "what is best" for all of us.
I personally think the freshly made coffee at some local coffee shops tastes better than anything I've ever brewed myself and a lot better than any coffee I've ever had made from a pod or K-cup. But that's my opinion, and I'm not going to judge you for yours.
On a more extreme scale, some people do like Big Macs better than some "gourmet" hamburger made at a fancy restaurant, or they might like Kraft mac & cheese better than many homemade baked varieties. I really don't think anyone should have to apologize for their tastes -- and for the Big Mac afficionado, they may actually know that some McDonalds restaurants make better tasting ones than others.
People like what they like. And I don't think someone should have to try to justify his or her experience. It's okay to like coffee made from a pod, and it's even okay to like some kind of dinner made from a box. (Whether any of this is "healthy" or "healthier" is a separate question -- I'm just talking about taste and enjoyment.)
Many people just feel somehow justified when their opinions mesh with the so-called "experts."
So where can I buy pre-prepared heat-and-eat healthy meals?
Oh, I don't know -- some local hippy supermarket that will charge you a ridiculous amount of money? Yes, you can probably buy healthy heat-and-eat meals, but it will cost you.
But why would you do that when you can have a lot more choice if you take minimal effort to do it yourself? In about the same amount of time it will take you to use the microwave or toaster oven to heat up your prepared dinner, you could probably make something yourself.
Most "TV dinners" are so loaded with sugar that I can't touch them,
If you're just looking for "better than TV dinners," that's pretty easy.
and spending the time to develop ancient and esoteric skills like "blacksmithing" or "cooking" aren't high up my list of hobbies this year.
You just need to buy some separate ingredients, and maybe look for one of those easy cookbooks with a title like "Easy one-dish meals" or something. With a couple cans and some frozen stuff, you can probably cut prep time down to a few minutes per meal. It's hardly rocket science to throw a few ingredients into a pot, stir, and heat.
Now, is this the best option? Of course not. But I'm sure with just a little experimentation and a decent cookbook, you'll pretty quickly figure out a dozen or more easy dishes you can throw together without even thinking. And by building your own dish from a few separate ingredients, you have a lot more control over your food already than with a packaged frozen TV dinner -- and you can get rid of the excess sugar and other bad stuff, not to mention choosing ingredients you like and making the dish taste better for you.
Heck, if you start doing this, you might even realize that it's pretty darn easy to cook at a basic level. You might even start buying fresh ingredients, figure out how to chop vegetables almost as fast as you could open a can or heat the bag from the freezer, etc. And then you'll be eating stuff that's a LOT more healthy than the frozen dinners.
But if you just throw up your hands and say, "It's too hard!", well, I don't know what to say. Your body is literally made out of what you eat. Making some minimal investment of 10 minutes per day or whatever in food preparation can probably have a much greater impact on your general quality of life than most things you could do. You don't have to take up cooking as a "hobby" and spend your weekend designing elaborate five-course dinners -- but I'd like to think that some people might have a vague utilitarian interest in putting better stuff into their bodies... enough to invest a few minutes per day.
Crops that are grown without herbicides etc. obviously can not be tainted by them, did you miss this?
GP didn't.
So how do you come to the idea that every food is contaminated by them?
I'm pretty sure GP isn't talking about "contamination." There are loads of "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal things that are part of human agriculture, long before modern "chemicals" were used for this process. Farmers for thousands of years gradually figured out practices that would grow fewer weeds while increasing yield.
The plants evolved along with this -- and farmers selected the ones that could outcompete and even actively resist weeds and fungi, because those were the crops that did the best.
There was a lot of "natural" genetic engineering going on in selective breeding, and "natural" herbicidal and fungicidal outcomes that were created by farming techniques -- soil preparation, time of year/frequency of planting or soil tending, etc.
In the end, all of our crops today have been inherently modified from the "natural" wild plants, so GP's point holds -- unless you're a hunter-gatherer, you are eating food that has been engineered to grow in ways that it generally wouldn't "naturally," Some part of that has to do with plants that have gradually evolved to outcompete and even discourage growth of weeds (herbicide) and resist disease (fungicide).
(Btw, before anyone jumps all over this comment, I'm not against perks... I'm just saying the math doesn't work out here.)
When I'm here at 8 o'clock at night -- I would much prefer free soda (or a pizza) to an extra $100 in my bank account.
With $100, I'm pretty sure you could order a pizza and lots of soda sent to your office, give a generous tip to the delivery guy, and still have quite a few bucks left in your bank account.
Generally speaking, "educational use" is not held to mean "so long as it's for education, do whatever you want". Educational use typically means discussion and criticism - using excerpts and passages to demonstrate a particular point, or using an example from a text.
It's important to note that the "fair use" guidelines in the U.S. are effectively the same for educational situations as they are for non-profit activities in general. It's a widely held misconception that there's some sort of "educator exception" for fair use, but there really isn't. Courts have generally recognized that fair use should be given a little more leeway in educational circumstances, but any (non-educator) person with a similar justification has effectively the same guidelines for fair use. Essentially, "whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes" is a factor to be considered in potential copyright violation claims, but that's all the legal guidance there is -- no specific education exception.
The ONLY significant copyright exception for educators isn't for copying at all. It's for "performance" or "display," and it used to only apply to face-to-face meetings in classrooms. That is, unlike some performance hall or something, an educator doesn't have to pay for rights to play a musical excerpt or film excerpt in class. A professor/teacher is free to put up images on a projection screen for educational purposes, without worrying about copyright protections. With the "Teach Act," this exception was expanded beyond face-to-face teaching to include "display" or "performance" through distance learning sites, as long as the sites are restricted to enrolled students (and conform to a number of other specific regulations).
Again, that exception for performance or display is the only official educational legal exception in the U.S., and it explicitly excludes textbooks, coursepacks, and other written materials that could otherwise be purchased for a class.
In general, there's really no such legal category as "educational use" in terms of actually making copies of something.
If the teacher had used fractions of the book as part of his lessons, he would likely have been covered under fair use provisions in many nations
Exactly -- under general "fair use," not necessarily specific to education. (Though again, fair use for educators is often easier to justify legally.)
(By the way, my interpretation of copyright law here is directly from the counsel's office at one of the top universities in the U.S.)