Who the heck is "Kalinka" and where is he getting this nonsense? There need be no literal apple of sin eaten for there to be "original sin." Even if a real, sinful fruit was eaten (I actually managed to type that with a straight face), the creation story doesn't need to be literal.
There may be some branches of christianity that use that reasoning to justify their simplistic insistence that the bible is to be taken word for word, but it definitely doesn't go for all branches, and it definitely doesn't make any real sense.
Except that there's no effort to lie about. They might lie and say they go to church every sunday, but they only don't go every sunday because they're lazy.
Beliefs on the other hand require no real effort. If they think they ought to believe in creationism, they probably aren't too convinced of evolution. I expect few of the people answering yes are really struggling to convince themselves creationism is right but actually are convinced of evolution. Furthermore, there's little difference between claiming to be a creationist and actually believing it: you're still promoting anti-science and ignorance, and are probably voting to have that proselytizing infiltrate the schools.
But if the internet isn't free for everyone, if it's locked down for everyone who isn't savvy enough to run tor or whatnot, then it really loses a lot of it's potential.
The internet recently catalyzed revolutions in several middle east countries. If the internet were wide open worldwide, that would be a tool against human rights suppression, and is one of the only real effective tools against that.
If they make it such that uploading or viewing videos of police beating down protestors is impossible for 90% of the users out there, then that's not a completely effective control, but it could be enough to stave off corrective action on the part of the citizenry.
Google updated a few hours before these guys revealed their accomplishment. TFA mentions that other groups had found less effective ways of circumventing the audio portion. Is there any indication that this was about to be a problem? How likely is it that anyone wanting to actually abuse it was about to figure this out themselves? Seems to me like there are so many suckers out there, that spammers don't need to spend too much time with things like this.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
Evolution in large populations doesn't work "in a few generations." Actually, in large populations, it really doesn't do much of anything according to punctuated equalibrium. Species stay mostly the same for hundreds of thousands of years.
Humans have always been this stupid since their first emergence, and have most certainly always been this stupid as long as you can remember. If you see changes in less than, say, a thousand years, that's due to societal, technological, and economic factors. Not genetic ones.
Participants who were unknowingly eating from self-refilling bowls ate more soup than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.
Your parents likely trained you to "eat everything on your plate" because you probably wanted as a kid to run off and play, and would get hungry and whiny and cranky an hour later. Which is understandable. But the effects seem to stay with you, to where if you're given an unhealthy amount of soda in one container, you have a subtle urge to drink all of it and not be satisfied until you do.
I certainly find that if I get a "Kids-size" soda, I'm satisfied with that. But more and more, you CANNOT buy reasonable sizes of drinks. Try finding a simple 12 oz can of soda at your local gas station. It's becoming a rarity. This doesn't seem to be due to demand, it's pretty clearly companies have realized if they only sell you bigger sizes, you'll give them more money.
This wouldn't be a health problem, except for that childhood training we all receive. If we were just throwing away soda since we couldn't buy exactly how much we wanted, that would be slightly annoying. But we don't throw it away. When nothing save for a "mega-diabetes" size is available, I have to throw the rest of it away. If I try to drink only part of it, and I find myself reaching for it while saying "My precccsiousssssss!"
And it becomes a societal problem when that causes diabetes and higher insurance costs for everyone. Well, that's a theory anyway, not one I'm particularly endorsing, but it's at least plausible. Banning the larger sizes is a bit heavy-handed by the government. I think simply offering smaller sizes would suffice, but I don't know how anyone can encourage that realistically. An awareness campaign to only buy smaller sodas?
It has little to do with beliefs at this point, tea partiers today are simply rooting for one side in a wrestling match. It's not that they think Triple-H has a better philosophy than The Rock Obama, they just have decided they really hate The Rock Obama.
Unfortunately, some interested parties have used that effectively to cut their own taxes to the point that conservatives who care about the future of the country are saying they're taking it too far.
Middle of an all out war? I don't really think it's the middle of anything. Science is always going to be opposed to ignorance and superstition. The proponents of ignorance and "My religion says your facts are wrong!" aren't burning scientists at the stake or arresting them too much anymore, so I'd say the battle has gotten more civil anyway.
Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued.
That's nonsense. It could easily be that a corporation could own property or be sued without being a person. We can see that from the fact that corporations are not actually people.
Instead of redefining corporations as people with constitutional rights, just redefine lawsuits as being something you could do to people OR corporations.
Don't oversimplify my position. There are special interests, shady officials, and election rigging, yes. There are always obstacles to anything worthwhile. Castro was supported by a lot of guns and by powerful overseas countries.
It is still the responsibility of the people to change things. The US, Russia, and the cuban army weren't going to liberate the Cuban people. It's not fair, you're absolutely right, but if you want something done, you have to do it yourself.
In the case of pot, we are in fact a democracy. Don't compare the pot legalization movement with the plight of the cubans, that's repugnant. You're not going to be jailed for expressing an opinion that we should legalize pot. If the voters weren't so apathetic about it, and actually voted, it would quickly be legal.
In case you ain't figured it out chuck big booze and pharma ain't gonna allow pot because it would cut into their business PERIOD.
I believe that you are the naive one here. The alchohol industry is not opposed to pot. Why would they be? Pharmecuticals don't either, they'd LOVE to sell you pot through prescriptions. There's no R&D costs, they wouldn't need to spend any money on marketing, and there's a colossal market for it as well.
It's law enforcement, the police state interests, and a few moral ninnies who are keeping it illegal. And that is much worse. They're the ones keeping the drug war going. They're the ones profiting off of it! Marijuana fuels the mexican cartels, which keeps the "war" going, which keeps their paychecks coming in. Plus, with 75% of the nation admitting to smoking pot, nearly everyone is breaking the law. They can arrest nearly anyone they want.
Sorry friend but if you think you can change a fucking thing by voting against big business you sir are a fool
So whining about how unfair it is on the internet is going to be more effective?
More to the point YES, WE COULD HAVE. I live in California, where we recently had a proposition to legalize pot. Proposition. Direct democracy. No lobbyists, just voters deciding.
It failed. Here. In California. Where our biggest product IS marijuana, and our budget is in the red.
The reason? Law enforcement partially, though they were divided over it this time, as some of them are realizing that fighting it means casualties. But what really killed it were two things. One is the growers deciding they didn't want their income taxed, nor did they want legal competition, and the other was straight up apathy. No one cared to make it legal and take power away from the police state.
So yeah, I do blame the voters and their apathy because it's a fact that they won't vote to make it legal. Here in California especially, but nationwide as well.
We separated from England because we didn't get a vote on taxes, yet didn't give most of our citizens the right to vote. We decided we weren't going to be a colony anymore, then went about making our own colonies (and were much more parasitic about it than the English). We prided ourselves on self-sustinence and freedom yet had slave labor long past the point where most other civilized countries had abolished it. And from the outset there were innumerable screwings-over of the previous inhabitants.
It's not like we've only -recently- become hypocrites.
Punctuated equilibrium. The reason creationists are constantly talking about "Darwinists" is because it's easier to disagree with a man who has been dead for a century than it is to refute current theory. Darwin was incorrect about gradualism and the fossil record. There aren't many evolutionary theorists who still think gradual evolution happened.
Very few (and let's face it, wacky) sects out there actually refuse to accept Darwin's theories of evolution these days, so I'm not really seeing the story here.
Sadly, that's not the case. There is that whole sect of "Eldredologists" and "Gouldists" out there with their "punctuated equilibrium," saying that gradualism is "just an obsolete theory." AND there are a bunch of neo-Lamarckians out there with their "epigenetics" psuedoscience crap! Keep your methyl groups off my children!
(Sorry, that was an incredibly nerdy joke playing off the fact that current evolutionary theory has advanced slightly in the 150 years since Darwin.)
Are we sure that the senate would reject ACTA? What are the chances that senators and big media spam the message "Well, this is important for american jobs, AND we've already signed it anyway, so we have no choice." They've gotten bigger lies past us.
The opponents of freedom and democracy usually are. I don't think it's that they're "relentless," I think it's more that we're comparatively lazy in defending our rights.
"Censorship on the internet again?! MAN! I just e-mailed my senator about SOPA a month ago!"
Wiki explains the existence of the vaccine court system:
The program was established by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), passed by the United States Congress in response to a threat to the vaccine supply due to a 1980s scare over the DPT vaccine. Despite the belief of most public health officials that claims of side effects were unfounded, large jury awards had been given to some plaintiffs, most DPT vaccine makers had ceased production, and officials feared the loss of herd immunity.
In other words, it exists because it was a target for greedy lawyers and needed to be protected.
I'll leave you to go on your tech utopian way, pretending that all tech is wonderful and nothing bad ever happens
How do you get that from "ALL technologies, with the possible exception of vaccines, are double edged swords"? Or from anything else I said?
I was offering advice. Few people take you seriously when you bring up "national socialist regimes." Of course, then you start bringing up anecdotal evidence against vaccines and call me biased, so maybe this is not a concern.
I'll say again, expensive DNA sequencing is not a barrier against the scenario you're talking about and leave it at that.
It is simple realism to recognize that most technologies are, in fact, double edged swords.
That was half of my point. Actually, ALL technologies, with the possible exception of vaccines, are double edged swords. But saying "Nazis might use it against us" is not a downside, that's just insane. I think you'll find that bringing up Nazis, zombies, or total nuclear annihilation will, with very specific exceptions, make you look like a raving loon.
Current evolutionary theory (punctuated equalibrium) though holds that species are typically static in terms of evolution. You only get real change when new species pop up and old species die off. Natural selection does very little in stable populations of species. You might be tall, and you might mate with a tall member of the opposite sex, and your offspring might be taller than average, but they have a better chance of mating with someone of average or below height. Unless you get reproductive isolation, you're not going to get much directional change.
You're not getting advantageous change, but you're not going to get disadvantageous change either. It will likely be a wash, with no change in ANY direction.
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Who the heck is "Kalinka" and where is he getting this nonsense? There need be no literal apple of sin eaten for there to be "original sin." Even if a real, sinful fruit was eaten (I actually managed to type that with a straight face), the creation story doesn't need to be literal.
There may be some branches of christianity that use that reasoning to justify their simplistic insistence that the bible is to be taken word for word, but it definitely doesn't go for all branches, and it definitely doesn't make any real sense.
I like that that we've been able to quantify the silliness of creationism.
Except that there's no effort to lie about. They might lie and say they go to church every sunday, but they only don't go every sunday because they're lazy.
Beliefs on the other hand require no real effort. If they think they ought to believe in creationism, they probably aren't too convinced of evolution. I expect few of the people answering yes are really struggling to convince themselves creationism is right but actually are convinced of evolution. Furthermore, there's little difference between claiming to be a creationist and actually believing it: you're still promoting anti-science and ignorance, and are probably voting to have that proselytizing infiltrate the schools.
But if the internet isn't free for everyone, if it's locked down for everyone who isn't savvy enough to run tor or whatnot, then it really loses a lot of it's potential.
The internet recently catalyzed revolutions in several middle east countries. If the internet were wide open worldwide, that would be a tool against human rights suppression, and is one of the only real effective tools against that.
If they make it such that uploading or viewing videos of police beating down protestors is impossible for 90% of the users out there, then that's not a completely effective control, but it could be enough to stave off corrective action on the part of the citizenry.
They say they're worried that China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia would gain control.
They're ACTUALLY worried about Sweden or the Netherlands gaining control.
Yeah, I don't respect the sanctity of first post trolling. I have all the shame that goes along with that.
Google updated a few hours before these guys revealed their accomplishment. TFA mentions that other groups had found less effective ways of circumventing the audio portion. Is there any indication that this was about to be a problem? How likely is it that anyone wanting to actually abuse it was about to figure this out themselves? Seems to me like there are so many suckers out there, that spammers don't need to spend too much time with things like this.
Of two links? (The other link being the image.)
Yes... very wise...
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
Evolution in large populations doesn't work "in a few generations." Actually, in large populations, it really doesn't do much of anything according to punctuated equalibrium. Species stay mostly the same for hundreds of thousands of years.
Humans have always been this stupid since their first emergence, and have most certainly always been this stupid as long as you can remember. If you see changes in less than, say, a thousand years, that's due to societal, technological, and economic factors. Not genetic ones.
Participants who were unknowingly eating from self-refilling bowls ate more soup than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.
Your parents likely trained you to "eat everything on your plate" because you probably wanted as a kid to run off and play, and would get hungry and whiny and cranky an hour later. Which is understandable. But the effects seem to stay with you, to where if you're given an unhealthy amount of soda in one container, you have a subtle urge to drink all of it and not be satisfied until you do.
I certainly find that if I get a "Kids-size" soda, I'm satisfied with that. But more and more, you CANNOT buy reasonable sizes of drinks. Try finding a simple 12 oz can of soda at your local gas station. It's becoming a rarity. This doesn't seem to be due to demand, it's pretty clearly companies have realized if they only sell you bigger sizes, you'll give them more money.
This wouldn't be a health problem, except for that childhood training we all receive. If we were just throwing away soda since we couldn't buy exactly how much we wanted, that would be slightly annoying. But we don't throw it away. When nothing save for a "mega-diabetes" size is available, I have to throw the rest of it away. If I try to drink only part of it, and I find myself reaching for it while saying "My precccsiousssssss!"
And it becomes a societal problem when that causes diabetes and higher insurance costs for everyone. Well, that's a theory anyway, not one I'm particularly endorsing, but it's at least plausible. Banning the larger sizes is a bit heavy-handed by the government. I think simply offering smaller sizes would suffice, but I don't know how anyone can encourage that realistically. An awareness campaign to only buy smaller sodas?
It has little to do with beliefs at this point, tea partiers today are simply rooting for one side in a wrestling match. It's not that they think Triple-H has a better philosophy than The Rock Obama, they just have decided they really hate The Rock Obama.
Unfortunately, some interested parties have used that effectively to cut their own taxes to the point that conservatives who care about the future of the country are saying they're taking it too far.
You're using thinking, which has already been outlawed by the NC legislature.
Middle of an all out war? I don't really think it's the middle of anything. Science is always going to be opposed to ignorance and superstition. The proponents of ignorance and "My religion says your facts are wrong!" aren't burning scientists at the stake or arresting them too much anymore, so I'd say the battle has gotten more civil anyway.
Okay, well that's now my reason why I don't do any volunteer work or give to charities: because I'm not some asshole "do-gooder."
Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued.
That's nonsense. It could easily be that a corporation could own property or be sued without being a person. We can see that from the fact that corporations are not actually people.
Instead of redefining corporations as people with constitutional rights, just redefine lawsuits as being something you could do to people OR corporations.
It is still the responsibility of the people to change things. The US, Russia, and the cuban army weren't going to liberate the Cuban people. It's not fair, you're absolutely right, but if you want something done, you have to do it yourself.
In the case of pot, we are in fact a democracy. Don't compare the pot legalization movement with the plight of the cubans, that's repugnant. You're not going to be jailed for expressing an opinion that we should legalize pot. If the voters weren't so apathetic about it, and actually voted, it would quickly be legal.
In case you ain't figured it out chuck big booze and pharma ain't gonna allow pot because it would cut into their business PERIOD.
I believe that you are the naive one here. The alchohol industry is not opposed to pot. Why would they be? Pharmecuticals don't either, they'd LOVE to sell you pot through prescriptions. There's no R&D costs, they wouldn't need to spend any money on marketing, and there's a colossal market for it as well.
It's law enforcement, the police state interests, and a few moral ninnies who are keeping it illegal. And that is much worse. They're the ones keeping the drug war going. They're the ones profiting off of it! Marijuana fuels the mexican cartels, which keeps the "war" going, which keeps their paychecks coming in. Plus, with 75% of the nation admitting to smoking pot, nearly everyone is breaking the law. They can arrest nearly anyone they want.
Sorry friend but if you think you can change a fucking thing by voting against big business you sir are a fool
So whining about how unfair it is on the internet is going to be more effective?
More to the point YES, WE COULD HAVE. I live in California, where we recently had a proposition to legalize pot. Proposition. Direct democracy. No lobbyists, just voters deciding.
It failed. Here. In California. Where our biggest product IS marijuana, and our budget is in the red.
The reason? Law enforcement partially, though they were divided over it this time, as some of them are realizing that fighting it means casualties. But what really killed it were two things. One is the growers deciding they didn't want their income taxed, nor did they want legal competition, and the other was straight up apathy. No one cared to make it legal and take power away from the police state.
So yeah, I do blame the voters and their apathy because it's a fact that they won't vote to make it legal. Here in California especially, but nationwide as well.
We separated from England because we didn't get a vote on taxes, yet didn't give most of our citizens the right to vote. We decided we weren't going to be a colony anymore, then went about making our own colonies (and were much more parasitic about it than the English). We prided ourselves on self-sustinence and freedom yet had slave labor long past the point where most other civilized countries had abolished it. And from the outset there were innumerable screwings-over of the previous inhabitants.
It's not like we've only -recently- become hypocrites.
Punctuated equilibrium. The reason creationists are constantly talking about "Darwinists" is because it's easier to disagree with a man who has been dead for a century than it is to refute current theory. Darwin was incorrect about gradualism and the fossil record. There aren't many evolutionary theorists who still think gradual evolution happened.
Very few (and let's face it, wacky) sects out there actually refuse to accept Darwin's theories of evolution these days, so I'm not really seeing the story here.
Sadly, that's not the case. There is that whole sect of "Eldredologists" and "Gouldists" out there with their "punctuated equilibrium," saying that gradualism is "just an obsolete theory." AND there are a bunch of neo-Lamarckians out there with their "epigenetics" psuedoscience crap! Keep your methyl groups off my children!
(Sorry, that was an incredibly nerdy joke playing off the fact that current evolutionary theory has advanced slightly in the 150 years since Darwin.)
Are we sure that the senate would reject ACTA? What are the chances that senators and big media spam the message "Well, this is important for american jobs, AND we've already signed it anyway, so we have no choice." They've gotten bigger lies past us.
The RIAA/MPAA and their ilk are quite relentless
The opponents of freedom and democracy usually are. I don't think it's that they're "relentless," I think it's more that we're comparatively lazy in defending our rights.
"Censorship on the internet again?! MAN! I just e-mailed my senator about SOPA a month ago!"
The program was established by the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA), passed by the United States Congress in response to a threat to the vaccine supply due to a 1980s scare over the DPT vaccine. Despite the belief of most public health officials that claims of side effects were unfounded, large jury awards had been given to some plaintiffs, most DPT vaccine makers had ceased production, and officials feared the loss of herd immunity.
In other words, it exists because it was a target for greedy lawyers and needed to be protected.
I'll leave you to go on your tech utopian way, pretending that all tech is wonderful and nothing bad ever happens
How do you get that from "ALL technologies, with the possible exception of vaccines, are double edged swords"? Or from anything else I said?
I was offering advice. Few people take you seriously when you bring up "national socialist regimes." Of course, then you start bringing up anecdotal evidence against vaccines and call me biased, so maybe this is not a concern.
I'll say again, expensive DNA sequencing is not a barrier against the scenario you're talking about and leave it at that.
It is simple realism to recognize that most technologies are, in fact, double edged swords.
That was half of my point. Actually, ALL technologies, with the possible exception of vaccines, are double edged swords. But saying "Nazis might use it against us" is not a downside, that's just insane. I think you'll find that bringing up Nazis, zombies, or total nuclear annihilation will, with very specific exceptions, make you look like a raving loon.
Current evolutionary theory (punctuated equalibrium) though holds that species are typically static in terms of evolution. You only get real change when new species pop up and old species die off. Natural selection does very little in stable populations of species. You might be tall, and you might mate with a tall member of the opposite sex, and your offspring might be taller than average, but they have a better chance of mating with someone of average or below height. Unless you get reproductive isolation, you're not going to get much directional change.
You're not getting advantageous change, but you're not going to get disadvantageous change either. It will likely be a wash, with no change in ANY direction.