Not that I entirely disagree with you, but when the issue is deterrence, is there merit in a proportional response? At what point does a tit-for-tat proportional bombing of a small target simply become the cost of doing business for a terrorist organization? At that point, there's clearly no value in responding at all. Sure, there's a point where the solution is clearly worse than the problem, but a response that is gentle enough not to leave a nation in ruin but firm enough to cause significant hardship to everybody involved is more likely to have a deterrent effect than a proportional response.
Interestingly, Nasrallah himself has said that if he had known that the Israeli response would be so severe, he wouldn't have approved the operations. I was shocked when I heard the news, because it's essentially an admission that the Israeli strikes were a workable deterrent, and he is unlikely to try such an operation again knowing the potential consequences. I doubt that striking a van with some Hezbollah officials in it would have had that effect. I'm certainly not for razing towns and salting the land Roman style, but there is something to be said for a response disproportional enough to be a deterrent.
Do you consider the best interests of the US lie in communicating with a secular, civilised democracy, or a genocidal, theocratic dictatorship ?
Both. Either they're doing something so bad that we should declare war and start bombing, or they're behaving well enough that we should talk to them and try to benefit from negotiations and agreements. By doing neither we get the worst of both worlds: they continue to behave badly with no consequences, and we get no concessions out of them through negotiation. "We don't talk to them" is no foreign policy at all.
Ding! That's the solution I opted for years ago, and I've never looked back. As a general rule of thumb (with the exception of professional grade inkjets that graphics shops use):
Inkjet printers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: They turn full ink cartridges into empty ones. Any printing that is done in the process is incidental.
Once mankind comes to terms with this fact and decides that the companies that design and sell them should not be rewarded, life will be better for all.
I do believe that there is in fact a scientific debate still going about evolution, because so much about evolution seems to be pure speculation.
Well, you're right to some extent, but the debate is about details, not whether evolutionary theory is valid. You seem to have a picture of evolutionary biology that is common: everybody sits around and speculates and comes up with stories. That's only part of the work. There's a lot of data to examine, and there are a lot of tests to do. Hypotheses can be tested via genetics. Predictions about fossil locations can be made and tested. It's really not nearly as arbitrary as you're making it sound, or there would be a lot more critics than there are.
Your comments on the origins of life, the universe, and everything are reasonable, but they don't really get you anywhere as a scientific model. Finding a large gap in our understanding and filling it with magic is certainly one way of going philosophically, but because the model of an omnipotent intervening force fits with any possible observation, it's not really useful as a scientific model. It doesn't give us a chance to expand our understanding about anything. I believe that the majority of scientists are still religious in one way or another. They generally don't let the supernatural creep into their work, though, as it short circuits the scientific method in much the same way dividing by zero allows you to prove all sorts of wrong things algebraically.
First of all, you mentioned dinosaurs with feathers. Assuming that natural selection is the mechanism by which evolution occurs, what advantage do dinosaurs with feathers have? Certainly they couldn't fly, and certainly natural selection is not some intelligent force that had birds in mind for the future. Also, could you give me an example of a dinosaur with feathers?
Feathers and hair are very similar in that they're useful as insulators, much as flaps of skin shaped like wings are useful for temperature regulation. Archaeopteryx is an example of a dinosaur / bird intermediate with features from both dinosaurs and birds.
It's interesting that AiG is still putting forth the bombardier beetle argument. It originated with Duane Gish, who had a completely inaccurate understanding of how the mechanism worked. From the looks of it, they've corrected the technical inacuracies and turned it into a simple argument from incredulity ("I can't imagine how this evolved, so it's not possible that evolved."). Mark Isaak proposes a possible evolutionary pathway here, and discusses some of the particulars with examples from different species. True, it may not have happened that way, but the existance of a relatively obvious set of possibilities definitely shoots down the claim that it couldn't have happened that way.
More interestingly, there is a time in the fossil record when bombardier beetles didn't exist. And a time when humans, rabbits, and all sorts of modern creatures didn't exist. At those times, other creatures did exist (dinosaurs, early sponges, etc.). Evolutionary theory explains this. Most of the various creation theories can't explain it, and instead resort to claiming that everything lived at the same time. Do you subscribe to this belief, or do you have an explanation as to how rabbits came into existence somewhere along the timeline?
As far as scientists who do not believe in evolution, I found this list online http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/bios/def ault.asp that contains many who do not believe in it (far more than two). These are just the scientists associated with this particular organization, so I am sure that there are many more. Some of the scientists also have written articles about themselves, and about what in their research led them to reject evo
That sounds like a really bad idea. "Here, enemy. This is a small version of an attack you're not familiar with or ready to defend against. Please familiarize yourself with it before I try it for real." It was a clever attack, but I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the larger strategy.
I don't know why you consider Noah's flood to be one of the most hilariously improbable bit of the bible. After all look at all the cultures that have a story in the oral history of a flood and a boat. Don't you think that this could be the same story, simply modified over time as it has been passed down in the oral traditions of the culture?
Well, most cultures lived near water, and often in flood plains, so it's not too much of a surprise that those themes would be common. I have to ask, though, how did the koala get to Australia? More interestingly, how were the koala and other animals that had very specific dietary needs fed?
I certainly wouldn't call it improbably when compared to the odds for a planet being the right distance from a star and with the right mixture of atmomphere, etc so that it was possible for life to "evolve". Talk about something being hilariously improbable!
Well, how many planets are there in the universe, and how many variations on that theme are there? Is it really necessary to have our atmospheric mixture? One could just as easily point out that this may be the puddle marvelling at the fact that the hole it's in fits its body just perfectly.
As to the geologic layers, we do get stratification, but what we don't get is a more simple to a more complex layering of fossils. Different layers may have different fossils in many cases and this accounts for many species that are now extinct, but we have complex and simple creatures at most if not all layers.
Reference? If you can find the frequently requested "rabbit in the cambrian" fossil, you will effectively have stomped on evolutionary theory and a lot of what we understand about this planet. I don't think that such a thing has happened, though.
Mutations as I stated in my original post are a given. Every species will have slight variations and changes. I would disagree with you on the stratigraphy, because there are examples of polystrate trees that would have (according to the old earth ideals) spanned millions of years. While I understand that trees can stand for many years after being dead and possible as much as a century (I personally know of some American Chestnuts that stood for many, many years after the blight), but I serisouly doubt them standing for millions of years to be encapulated and fossilized completely at a later time.
Nobody is suggesting that such trees stood for millions of years in order to be fossilized. Wikipedia has a good description of the mainstream geological interpretation of upright fossils here, so I won't bother discussing it here.
My simple question for you, is where are the horses and rabbits in the cambrian? Why are there no bear fossils to be found underneath dinosaur fossils? Evolutionary theory explains this and more.
I've done a fair bit of reading on the subject, actually. (Although I do admit I'm not as inspired to read any "new proof" considering the trend the old proof follows.)
That's very fair-minded of you.
We don't have a complete fossil record. Heck, the pieces of the *incomplete* fossil record is generally explained away (the Nebraska Man, the Piltdown man, etc, etc, etc). Yes, any conclusive evidence would be lost to time, but that doesn't lend any credence to that conclusion.
I notice that the only two examples of homonids you've referenced are the two discredited examples that make up a tiny minority of the actual set of interesting fossil finds. How much research have you actually done, and where? Did you happen to do all of your research here?
The DNA evidence really doesn't prove anything at all. Yes, it's similar. Most creatures have DNA that is strikingly similar, and considering how similar humans and apes are, it would be a surprise if it were drastically different.
It's not just that the DNA is similar. It's also that non-coding regions that have no reason to be similar are similar in exactly the way we would expect them to be. It's also interesting to note that the difference in chromosome count between us and apes can be explained by fusion of two chromosomes... and the genetic evidence shows that one of our chromosomes is a fusion of the information contained in two of the ape chromosomes. Interesting discussion of such translocations here.
If you actually examine it beyond the "our genes our similar" level, the evidence is extraordinarily compelling.
Exactly what do you mean by that? They've been evolving for the same amount of time. They've just evolved in different regions of the world, isolated from one another.
Well, it is pretty common in some circles - it gets around the issue of "what is inflation"? If you dig deeply, our numbers for inflation are either too low (as in include the effects of product replacement) or too high (do not account for standard of living adjustments). The S&P numbers let you just use non-adjusted dollars, with a realistic history.
Sure, the inflation estimates may not be totally accurate, but it is at least a solid estimate of real goods and services produced. If you look at the history of stock indexes back 100 years or so and plot P/E ratios vs. GDP growth, you'll see a tremendous divergence that can't be explained by poor estimates of inflation alone. There have to be other factors involved, and I can't think of any that would reasonably explain the difference that is sound in the long run. Using an asset that's subject to tremendous speculation about the future of economic growth as an estimate of economic growth strikes me as presuming the consequent.
Precisely the econ answer! But, if the fixed exchange rate is keeping the Chinese Yaun too high, why are the people with the best information (the insiders) buying up dollars as fast as possible? Supposedly if and when the exchange rate floats, they will lose billions - but that prediction has some assumptions that make sense in the US, but not in China (mainly dealing with stability). (This is one where I really wonder what will happen long term - my guess in that China will stabilize its financial systems and then they will stop investing - and then we either raise taxes or cut programs...)...they're making money in asset markets...
Well, to my knowledge, the largest Chinese purchasers of US treasury securities are the government run institutions that have an interest in manipulating exchange rates. As for other investors, I can't explain it beyond the fact that they can be pretty certain that any exchange rate adjustments would have to be slow to avoid devastating effects to the Chinese economy. It's also worth noting that the private bankers in China are the same ones who are currently saddled with dangrous levels of bad debt from poor lending choices, so I wouldn't put a tremendous amount of stock in their foresight or brilliance at exploiting risk-free opportunity. They have been shown to be fallible before, just like the zillions of investors who lost big bucks in the last stock market adjustment (remember when people were saying, "No, the stock market can't be overvalued! How is it that you know something that all of these investors don't??").
The people setting exchange rate policy in China are just as smart as our central bankers, though, so I can't see them changing their exchange rate policy too quickly under practially any circumstances. In the long run, though, they've given up domestic monetary policy to us, so I suppose it could get very interesting if our money supply needs suddenly diverged in a catastrophic fashion. The Chinese would have a very tough choice to make, and it could have bad effects on all of us.
What is truely fascinating, though, is that the Fed is extremely good at this (and they do not apply typical "trade imbalance is bad" types of analysis) - but more amazingly, Congress seems to have a feel for this as well, in that they do not tend to do the truely bad things (like nationalization of companies - oil companies - by taking away excess profits; closing our borders to Chinese trade to "fix" the trade balance, etc). I am sure that there is a mechanism that explains that - possibly something akin to applying the unseen hand to politics. Any thoughts?
I agree that you won't see Fed economists saying "trade imbalance is bad," but you may get a more qualified answer like, "Trade imbalance as it is can't be sustained indefinitely, but anything either side does to forcibly fix the issue in the short run would be a disaster for both parties."
I'm interested in the source of this - surely noone can prove that they really know what they are talking about on Slashdot except through discourse. No one is going to look up my degrees, no one will check to see if I'm on the board at the Fed, etc. So here on Slashdot, logic (and showing sources, I guess) must rule.
No, you're quite right. The credentials pissing matches on Slashdot are always fascinating to watch. Saying, "I'm an expert in X" during a discussion on X is a lot like saying, "I'm really tall" when talking to a person face to face. If you are, it should be pretty clear. It's very true that economists disagree on a great many things, but what goes largely unreported is that they're largely in agreement on a lot of general principles. For example, the claim that a perpetual trade deficit is indefinitely sustainable is widely agreed not to be true for very sound reasons.
What gets me more is people throwing around terms that they don't understand and bullying people new to the topic with jargon and arrogance. There is a regular poster who goes on anti-Keynesian rants occasionally and throws out claims like the idea that the Laffer Curve implies that lowering taxes always raises tax revenues. I imagine that to somebody who hasn't actually studied Keynes or the Laffer Curve, he sounds authoritative (especially since he sounds pissed off at "non experts" for even daring to question him), but to somebody who has actually seen those words used in real textbooks, it looks like nonsense. It's the same phenomenon that keeps "Dr. Dino" in business.
Basically, watching people who have clearly never studied biology beyond a high school course piss on the life's work of 150 years of professional scientists puts me in a certain mood. I find the psychology of fake Internet experts fascinating, and discussions of evolutionary theory are a prime place for them. Economics is another field which, while not as well established as biology, physics, and math, also draws crazies like flies to shit.
I think you caught me mixing units - I was referring to SP500 growth as a proxy for the economy - your probably thinking real GDP growth, but the loan is essentailly a zero interest rate in real dollars, so it ends up still being like I said.
Why on earth would you use the S&P 500 for that?
The short answer is that in order to do that, you need a large up front investment in infrastructure. It doesn't make sense to do that if Saudi Arabia can decide tommorow to lower the prices back to $20 per barrel. (Of course, there are ways around that using future contracts so we are slowly building up the capacity)
Everything I've heard from petroleum people is that Saudi Arabia is much closer to capacity than they claim, and it would be a huge overreach for them to bring prices down to anything remotely near $20 a barrel, especially given the expected growth in demand the markets are expecting.
That is indeed the critical question - and the answer is also very interesting, though a little involved for a Slashdot post. The short version is that the people with the money do not trust that they will be allowed to keep it if it is in country.
The shorter answer is that it's an inevitable result of the fixed echange rate regime that the Chinese central bank has enforced for years. There are lots of ramifications to it (especially when it comes to the fact that it's not particularly sustainable), but that's it in a nutshell.
OK, but you are basically taking the best predictors we have and throwing them away - I bet you didn't go to business school...
I can't speak for the grandparent, but I didn't go to business school. I did major in economics, although I'm not working as an economist (and I don't work in business or finance). I'm just rankled by armchair economists who think that because they're making money in asset markets, they understand international macroeconomics. They're a lot like the armies of computer scientists around here who think they know more about biology than biologists do.
Have you tried doing a Google search for some of these questions. There has been a lot of discussion on many of them. The history of eyes is reasonabley well understood, for example. Likewise, there has been a lot of discussion in the literature on possible pathways for immune systems to evolve lately. That's not to say that all of the questions are answered. You seem to be implying that these questions are somehow insurmountable problems for evolutionary theory, or that answers to them simply don't exist. The reality is, you don't appear to have looked very hard, and you're complaining that the experts haven't come knocking at your door to spoon feed you the answers.
An interesting question: Why exactly would the feelings you mention not have selective advantage among social animals, especially those that care for their young?
Google "Robertsonian translocation" and "chimpanzee" for some striking information on genetics and examples of genetic markers relevant to your question. Your remark about Downs Syndrom is relevant, becaue it's an example of this particular fusion, but there are other possible results, and it has interesting effects on the ability to interbreed.
No matter what examples of genetic mutation you give creationists, they'll always be able to spin it into the meaningless "loss of information" argument. If we watched a massive series of rapid mutations produce wings on horses, they'd say that the mutation resulted in "the loss of the inability to fly."
In any case, why do so many people equate "not perfect" with "utterly worthless"? If you're waiting for a perfect system, it's never going to happen.
The difference between "useless" and "not perfect" is the difference between falsely flagging a manageable handful of people for closer investiation and flagging thousands upon thousands of people with an 8% false accept rate. If your alarm cries wolf at that rate, there's no way you have the manpower to get your hands around the problem.
Similar to polygraph tests. Let's say you have a 10% false hit rate and ask 20 questions for a security clearance. You have an expected value of 2 "deceptive" answers that dump on some poor schmuck's chances of getting a security clearance. The FBI and others get around this by falling back on the fact that they have *lots* of qualified applicants and they'll eventually find ones that pass the polygraph. Air travel doesn't quite have that luxury ("let's bounce 8% of our customers at random every time they travel and see how it works").
Basically, it's cute and clever, but until they make it more accurate, it's more trouble than it's worth.
Are these same people going to suddenly have more money if the drugs were legal?
No, but they'd have to spend less of what they had in order get the same amount of the narcotic. Either it will boost their usage to soak up the extra cash or they'll have to mug fewer people to support the habit. Either way, things don't really get worse when it comes to current addicts.
You think so? I doubt it. Drug lords, though selling an illegal substance, are following pretty good captialist ideals. They charge what they can get. What makes you think a capitalist company would do any different? It's incredibly easy to charge as much as you want when your product is highly addictive...
You seem to think that the local drug lord would somehow have a monopoly and be able to dictate market prices. That's almost certainly not true. It may be nearly true now as supply is artificially limited, but once you take artificial scarcity out of the game, competition comes into effect, just like it does with alcohol and cigarettes. The only way you get ahead making those drugs is by differentiating yourself to produce some semblence of monopolistic competition (e.g. microbrews).
Another important thing to remember is that with the exception of meth, a lot of our drug supply comes from outside the borders because large illegal crops are hard to grow here. Legalizing those crops (at least those that can grow effectivley within our borders) will reduce our trade deficit somewhat. Not to mention it's a serious poke in the eye to the large scale drug farmers in central America who rely on huge margins to maintain control over their crime empires and destablize local governments. You could hit them really hard by legalizing their crops locally, growing them locally, and putting a huge tarriff on imports. Local prices would drop to where the margins were no longer worth paying smugglers, and the legitimate path to entry would take a chunk out of their bottom line.
I agree to some extent, but I think that the percentage of people who would attack us just for being there vs people who attack us for what they perceive to be concrete geopolitical reasons is quite a bit smaller than you think it is. The craziest of the crazy may be the ones in charge and driving policy, but I would guess that the people on the ground would, by and large, not be easily convinced that the issue was worth dying for unless there was some serious geopolitical cause involved. I have to wonder how easy it would be to recruit terrorists to die in an attack on Norway or China, each of which most likely has a culture that violates a number of funamental Islamic principals.
The reason I'm worried about the "they'll attack us no matter what" attitude is that I think that it creates a policy that's fundamentally destructive. If we can position ourselves in such a way that the average citizen of a devoutly Muslim country doesn't think we should all be killed, it makes it much easier to weed out the ones who do want us dead and are willing ot act on it. As it stands, we don't have a lot of policing support in the nations that harbor terrorists largely because the average non-terrorist citizen isn't too fond of us and doesn't particularly think it's a bad thing for us to get poked in the eye. If we can just be introspective enough to change the general opinion to "well, they're not Muslims, but we shouldn't be killing them," it's a lot harder for terrorists to operate and recruit within those countries.
The problem we have fundamentally is the fact that politicians are scared to be introspective about how our foreign policy affects our popularity because they're afraid to be labeled as "nutty blame-America-first America-haters!" The simple assumption seems to be, "We're Americans and we've always been the good guys, therefore everything we do is good and anybody who thinks it's not is bad." Admitting that our foreign policy may be stepping on some toes and encouraging terrorism against us is not the same as beliving that such terrorism is justified. Likewise, admitting that we may be stirring up hornets' nests unnecessarily is not necessarily the same as capitulating to terrorist demands. All we get by admitting no fault (or assuming that nothing we can do aside from killing the bad guys will ever make things better) does is leave us on the bad side of populations we should be relying upon to police themselves.
At some point you have to understand that these people want to kill us because we're different from them. Much of this "we want back Jerusalem" or "we don't want you interfering with our affairs" is merely a way to put a face on the ugliest of all human reactions: xenophobia, the fear of that which is foreign or different.
Let's take this as 100% true for the sake of argument. Are you saying that none of the suicide bombers are doing it for political reasons? Even if the people at the top are motivated by issues other than the ones they air most loudly, do you really think that they would have nearly as easy a time finding actual recruits if the only statable objective they have is international genocide 200 people at a time? I'm willing to bet that if you want to find a suicide bomber to carry out your agenda, it's easier to convince him to do so by listing the "crimes" of a given nation and getting him whipped up into a frenzy over the fact that he's persecuted than it is to say, "Well, they're actually leaving us alone, but you should still kill yourself to attack them because they're different." Sure, you'd still have organizations of crazies, but I'm betting that actual suicide bombers and other "soldiers" wouldn't be lining up by the hundreds to lash out. The lack of righteous indignation can really take the wind out of the sails of even the most crazed movement.
Who else would write "How else do you explain their support for setting up torture and murder camps all over the world..." with a signature like "Be a patriot: Murder a Republican."
Well, I'd rather not get into the rest of the thread here as I'm not really a fan of murdering people who disagree with me politically, but I think that there might be a difference between facetiously advocating murder in a.sig and actually torturing people. I'm just saying.
I'm old enough to remember when they are ALL in agreement that we were coming up on a new ice age (way back in the 70's.)
Challenge! Please provide some evidence that there was anywhere near a consensus. Or even a majority. Actually, I'll accept a reasonable plurality. Anything but an article about a "new idea" proposed by one or two climatologists written up in Scientific American.
This is one of those little nuggets like "you only use 10% of your brain" and "human DNA is closer to frog DNA than to chimpanzee DNA" that just sort of floats around there like gospel truth in debates like this. Documentation, please.
Ever heard of the Laffler Curve? its considered to be economic fact as well. every time you cut taxes revenue increases. Why? becuase money expands, and the more it expands, the more of it the government takes in. Saying that is not true, is like saying water flows uphill.
:::boggle:::
Not to get into the rest of your post, but you clearly have no clue what you're talking about here. The Laffer Curve is a *curve* with (at least one) local maximum. That implies that there are regions along the curve when d(revenue)/d(tax rate) is positive and regions when it is negative. Of course, given the fact that the idealized Laffer Curve is always drawn in textbooks as an inverted parabola, it should be plainly obvious that your statement does not hold, even ignoring the fact that there's no reason to think that it has only one local maximum over its domain. Your interpretation of the LC to state that tax revenue increases whenever tax rates decrease is simply nonsense, but sadly, it's probably more common than not among the "government spending is always unambiguously bad" crowd. Come on and do a thought experiment. Drop the marginal tax rates to zero and see if government revenues go up.
I'd love to hear you expound more on Keynesian economic theory and how it relates to Marxism too. Your connecting the two because they're both stupid dummy-head ideas is intriguing to me.
Posts like yours worry me because I'm concerned that there are people who haven't really studied economics who will be intimidated into believing you because you invoke terms like the Laffer Curve and Keynesian theory. Seriously, take an economics class that uses an economics textbook and learn the definitions of the terms you throw around from somebody other than pundits on the Internet.
Laffer Curve! IS-LM! Phillips Curve! I am the One True Expert! Woe to all those who challenge my random regurigitation of jargon!
Ding! I think you're just managed to point out why government funded research is practially always better funded than privately funded research unless there's immediate profit to be made.
And, for that Security Clearance, if you are honest and forth-coming about the arrest and other such stuff, it won't prevent you from being cleared. What was your point again?
The people who do background investigations for security clearances are often former law enforcment officers. Their job is to carefully scrutinize your past and look for things that make you look bad. They may be friendly to you during the interview, and they're probably very nice people, but it doesn't change the fact that they're not your advocates. What percentage of people in the US have been arrested? Only a small percentage. And now you're on that list. Were you not charged because you were innocent, or were you not charged because they couldn't get enough dirt on you or for some legal technicality? It often ends up being your word against the arresting officer's, and while that may be enough for you to avoid charges, it's a black mark against you. Any investigator worth his paycheck knows that you may very well have been in the wrong, even if no charges were made. At the very least, it will make the whole process take longer, which can be costly in and of itself.
There's a second interesting factor as well. A lot of our government agencies still believe in the magic of the "lie detector" test. Even though it seems to be about as useful as magic traitor-detecting crystals, it's still in use for a lot of high level clearances. You can bet that if you have an arrest on your record, you will be polygraphed on the subject. Given the false hit rate, I would hope to avoid as many potentially incriminating lines of questioning as possible, even if I was completely innocent.
My point is this: being arrested is a pretty big deal for the average law-abiding citizen, whether they're charged with anything or not. It carries with it much of the social stigma of being charged with a crime but not being convicted. It puts you on a relatively short list of people with the dubious distinction of having had a semi-serious brush with the law, and in doing so, it puts you in pretty bad company. The cost to an individual citizen may not be easy to quantify in all cases, but it's sure a lot more of an issue than a simple "Oops. I guess I shouldn't have arrested you, but it's your fault for being an asshole" can fix.
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Not that I entirely disagree with you, but when the issue is deterrence, is there merit in a proportional response? At what point does a tit-for-tat proportional bombing of a small target simply become the cost of doing business for a terrorist organization? At that point, there's clearly no value in responding at all. Sure, there's a point where the solution is clearly worse than the problem, but a response that is gentle enough not to leave a nation in ruin but firm enough to cause significant hardship to everybody involved is more likely to have a deterrent effect than a proportional response.
Interestingly, Nasrallah himself has said that if he had known that the Israeli response would be so severe, he wouldn't have approved the operations. I was shocked when I heard the news, because it's essentially an admission that the Israeli strikes were a workable deterrent, and he is unlikely to try such an operation again knowing the potential consequences. I doubt that striking a van with some Hezbollah officials in it would have had that effect. I'm certainly not for razing towns and salting the land Roman style, but there is something to be said for a response disproportional enough to be a deterrent.
Ding! That's the solution I opted for years ago, and I've never looked back. As a general rule of thumb (with the exception of professional grade inkjets that graphics shops use):
Inkjet printers are designed to do one thing and one thing only: They turn full ink cartridges into empty ones. Any printing that is done in the process is incidental.
Once mankind comes to terms with this fact and decides that the companies that design and sell them should not be rewarded, life will be better for all.
Well, you're right to some extent, but the debate is about details, not whether evolutionary theory is valid. You seem to have a picture of evolutionary biology that is common: everybody sits around and speculates and comes up with stories. That's only part of the work. There's a lot of data to examine, and there are a lot of tests to do. Hypotheses can be tested via genetics. Predictions about fossil locations can be made and tested. It's really not nearly as arbitrary as you're making it sound, or there would be a lot more critics than there are.
Your comments on the origins of life, the universe, and everything are reasonable, but they don't really get you anywhere as a scientific model. Finding a large gap in our understanding and filling it with magic is certainly one way of going philosophically, but because the model of an omnipotent intervening force fits with any possible observation, it's not really useful as a scientific model. It doesn't give us a chance to expand our understanding about anything. I believe that the majority of scientists are still religious in one way or another. They generally don't let the supernatural creep into their work, though, as it short circuits the scientific method in much the same way dividing by zero allows you to prove all sorts of wrong things algebraically.
Feathers and hair are very similar in that they're useful as insulators, much as flaps of skin shaped like wings are useful for temperature regulation. Archaeopteryx is an example of a dinosaur / bird intermediate with features from both dinosaurs and birds.
It's interesting that AiG is still putting forth the bombardier beetle argument. It originated with Duane Gish, who had a completely inaccurate understanding of how the mechanism worked. From the looks of it, they've corrected the technical inacuracies and turned it into a simple argument from incredulity ("I can't imagine how this evolved, so it's not possible that evolved."). Mark Isaak proposes a possible evolutionary pathway here, and discusses some of the particulars with examples from different species. True, it may not have happened that way, but the existance of a relatively obvious set of possibilities definitely shoots down the claim that it couldn't have happened that way.
More interestingly, there is a time in the fossil record when bombardier beetles didn't exist. And a time when humans, rabbits, and all sorts of modern creatures didn't exist. At those times, other creatures did exist (dinosaurs, early sponges, etc.). Evolutionary theory explains this. Most of the various creation theories can't explain it, and instead resort to claiming that everything lived at the same time. Do you subscribe to this belief, or do you have an explanation as to how rabbits came into existence somewhere along the timeline?
That sounds like a really bad idea. "Here, enemy. This is a small version of an attack you're not familiar with or ready to defend against. Please familiarize yourself with it before I try it for real." It was a clever attack, but I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the larger strategy.
Well, how many planets are there in the universe, and how many variations on that theme are there? Is it really necessary to have our atmospheric mixture? One could just as easily point out that this may be the puddle marvelling at the fact that the hole it's in fits its body just perfectly.
Nobody is suggesting that such trees stood for millions of years in order to be fossilized. Wikipedia has a good description of the mainstream geological interpretation of upright fossils here, so I won't bother discussing it here.
My simple question for you, is where are the horses and rabbits in the cambrian? Why are there no bear fossils to be found underneath dinosaur fossils? Evolutionary theory explains this and more.
I notice that the only two examples of homonids you've referenced are the two discredited examples that make up a tiny minority of the actual set of interesting fossil finds. How much research have you actually done, and where? Did you happen to do all of your research here?
It's not just that the DNA is similar. It's also that non-coding regions that have no reason to be similar are similar in exactly the way we would expect them to be. It's also interesting to note that the difference in chromosome count between us and apes can be explained by fusion of two chromosomes... and the genetic evidence shows that one of our chromosomes is a fusion of the information contained in two of the ape chromosomes. Interesting discussion of such translocations here.
If you actually examine it beyond the "our genes our similar" level, the evidence is extraordinarily compelling.
Sure, the inflation estimates may not be totally accurate, but it is at least a solid estimate of real goods and services produced. If you look at the history of stock indexes back 100 years or so and plot P/E ratios vs. GDP growth, you'll see a tremendous divergence that can't be explained by poor estimates of inflation alone. There have to be other factors involved, and I can't think of any that would reasonably explain the difference that is sound in the long run. Using an asset that's subject to tremendous speculation about the future of economic growth as an estimate of economic growth strikes me as presuming the consequent.
Well, to my knowledge, the largest Chinese purchasers of US treasury securities are the government run institutions that have an interest in manipulating exchange rates. As for other investors, I can't explain it beyond the fact that they can be pretty certain that any exchange rate adjustments would have to be slow to avoid devastating effects to the Chinese economy. It's also worth noting that the private bankers in China are the same ones who are currently saddled with dangrous levels of bad debt from poor lending choices, so I wouldn't put a tremendous amount of stock in their foresight or brilliance at exploiting risk-free opportunity. They have been shown to be fallible before, just like the zillions of investors who lost big bucks in the last stock market adjustment (remember when people were saying, "No, the stock market can't be overvalued! How is it that you know something that all of these investors don't??").
The people setting exchange rate policy in China are just as smart as our central bankers, though, so I can't see them changing their exchange rate policy too quickly under practially any circumstances. In the long run, though, they've given up domestic monetary policy to us, so I suppose it could get very interesting if our money supply needs suddenly diverged in a catastrophic fashion. The Chinese would have a very tough choice to make, and it could have bad effects on all of us.
I agree that you won't see Fed economists saying "trade imbalance is bad," but you may get a more qualified answer like, "Trade imbalance as it is can't be sustained indefinitely, but anything either side does to forcibly fix the issue in the short run would be a disaster for both parties."
What gets me more is people throwing around terms that they don't understand and bullying people new to the topic with jargon and arrogance. There is a regular poster who goes on anti-Keynesian rants occasionally and throws out claims like the idea that the Laffer Curve implies that lowering taxes always raises tax revenues. I imagine that to somebody who hasn't actually studied Keynes or the Laffer Curve, he sounds authoritative (especially since he sounds pissed off at "non experts" for even daring to question him), but to somebody who has actually seen those words used in real textbooks, it looks like nonsense. It's the same phenomenon that keeps "Dr. Dino" in business.
Basically, watching people who have clearly never studied biology beyond a high school course piss on the life's work of 150 years of professional scientists puts me in a certain mood. I find the psychology of fake Internet experts fascinating, and discussions of evolutionary theory are a prime place for them. Economics is another field which, while not as well established as biology, physics, and math, also draws crazies like flies to shit.
Have you tried doing a Google search for some of these questions. There has been a lot of discussion on many of them. The history of eyes is reasonabley well understood, for example. Likewise, there has been a lot of discussion in the literature on possible pathways for immune systems to evolve lately. That's not to say that all of the questions are answered. You seem to be implying that these questions are somehow insurmountable problems for evolutionary theory, or that answers to them simply don't exist. The reality is, you don't appear to have looked very hard, and you're complaining that the experts haven't come knocking at your door to spoon feed you the answers.
An interesting question: Why exactly would the feelings you mention not have selective advantage among social animals, especially those that care for their young?
Google "Robertsonian translocation" and "chimpanzee" for some striking information on genetics and examples of genetic markers relevant to your question. Your remark about Downs Syndrom is relevant, becaue it's an example of this particular fusion, but there are other possible results, and it has interesting effects on the ability to interbreed.
No matter what examples of genetic mutation you give creationists, they'll always be able to spin it into the meaningless "loss of information" argument. If we watched a massive series of rapid mutations produce wings on horses, they'd say that the mutation resulted in "the loss of the inability to fly."
Similar to polygraph tests. Let's say you have a 10% false hit rate and ask 20 questions for a security clearance. You have an expected value of 2 "deceptive" answers that dump on some poor schmuck's chances of getting a security clearance. The FBI and others get around this by falling back on the fact that they have *lots* of qualified applicants and they'll eventually find ones that pass the polygraph. Air travel doesn't quite have that luxury ("let's bounce 8% of our customers at random every time they travel and see how it works").
Basically, it's cute and clever, but until they make it more accurate, it's more trouble than it's worth.
New addicts are a different question.
Another important thing to remember is that with the exception of meth, a lot of our drug supply comes from outside the borders because large illegal crops are hard to grow here. Legalizing those crops (at least those that can grow effectivley within our borders) will reduce our trade deficit somewhat. Not to mention it's a serious poke in the eye to the large scale drug farmers in central America who rely on huge margins to maintain control over their crime empires and destablize local governments. You could hit them really hard by legalizing their crops locally, growing them locally, and putting a huge tarriff on imports. Local prices would drop to where the margins were no longer worth paying smugglers, and the legitimate path to entry would take a chunk out of their bottom line.
I agree to some extent, but I think that the percentage of people who would attack us just for being there vs people who attack us for what they perceive to be concrete geopolitical reasons is quite a bit smaller than you think it is. The craziest of the crazy may be the ones in charge and driving policy, but I would guess that the people on the ground would, by and large, not be easily convinced that the issue was worth dying for unless there was some serious geopolitical cause involved. I have to wonder how easy it would be to recruit terrorists to die in an attack on Norway or China, each of which most likely has a culture that violates a number of funamental Islamic principals.
The reason I'm worried about the "they'll attack us no matter what" attitude is that I think that it creates a policy that's fundamentally destructive. If we can position ourselves in such a way that the average citizen of a devoutly Muslim country doesn't think we should all be killed, it makes it much easier to weed out the ones who do want us dead and are willing ot act on it. As it stands, we don't have a lot of policing support in the nations that harbor terrorists largely because the average non-terrorist citizen isn't too fond of us and doesn't particularly think it's a bad thing for us to get poked in the eye. If we can just be introspective enough to change the general opinion to "well, they're not Muslims, but we shouldn't be killing them," it's a lot harder for terrorists to operate and recruit within those countries.
The problem we have fundamentally is the fact that politicians are scared to be introspective about how our foreign policy affects our popularity because they're afraid to be labeled as "nutty blame-America-first America-haters!" The simple assumption seems to be, "We're Americans and we've always been the good guys, therefore everything we do is good and anybody who thinks it's not is bad." Admitting that our foreign policy may be stepping on some toes and encouraging terrorism against us is not the same as beliving that such terrorism is justified. Likewise, admitting that we may be stirring up hornets' nests unnecessarily is not necessarily the same as capitulating to terrorist demands. All we get by admitting no fault (or assuming that nothing we can do aside from killing the bad guys will ever make things better) does is leave us on the bad side of populations we should be relying upon to police themselves.
This is one of those little nuggets like "you only use 10% of your brain" and "human DNA is closer to frog DNA than to chimpanzee DNA" that just sort of floats around there like gospel truth in debates like this. Documentation, please.
Not to get into the rest of your post, but you clearly have no clue what you're talking about here. The Laffer Curve is a *curve* with (at least one) local maximum. That implies that there are regions along the curve when d(revenue)/d(tax rate) is positive and regions when it is negative. Of course, given the fact that the idealized Laffer Curve is always drawn in textbooks as an inverted parabola, it should be plainly obvious that your statement does not hold, even ignoring the fact that there's no reason to think that it has only one local maximum over its domain. Your interpretation of the LC to state that tax revenue increases whenever tax rates decrease is simply nonsense, but sadly, it's probably more common than not among the "government spending is always unambiguously bad" crowd. Come on and do a thought experiment. Drop the marginal tax rates to zero and see if government revenues go up.
I'd love to hear you expound more on Keynesian economic theory and how it relates to Marxism too. Your connecting the two because they're both stupid dummy-head ideas is intriguing to me. Posts like yours worry me because I'm concerned that there are people who haven't really studied economics who will be intimidated into believing you because you invoke terms like the Laffer Curve and Keynesian theory. Seriously, take an economics class that uses an economics textbook and learn the definitions of the terms you throw around from somebody other than pundits on the Internet.
Laffer Curve! IS-LM! Phillips Curve! I am the One True Expert! Woe to all those who challenge my random regurigitation of jargon!
There's a second interesting factor as well. A lot of our government agencies still believe in the magic of the "lie detector" test. Even though it seems to be about as useful as magic traitor-detecting crystals, it's still in use for a lot of high level clearances. You can bet that if you have an arrest on your record, you will be polygraphed on the subject. Given the false hit rate, I would hope to avoid as many potentially incriminating lines of questioning as possible, even if I was completely innocent.
My point is this: being arrested is a pretty big deal for the average law-abiding citizen, whether they're charged with anything or not. It carries with it much of the social stigma of being charged with a crime but not being convicted. It puts you on a relatively short list of people with the dubious distinction of having had a semi-serious brush with the law, and in doing so, it puts you in pretty bad company. The cost to an individual citizen may not be easy to quantify in all cases, but it's sure a lot more of an issue than a simple "Oops. I guess I shouldn't have arrested you, but it's your fault for being an asshole" can fix.