His belief that the world was ordered came from his deeper belief that there is a sentient creator.
I'm not sure about that. Many mathematicians like proofs or concepts to have a certain elegance or clarity. That's probably because a lot of pioneering mathematics work was elegant. However, was that early work elegant because there's necessarily elegance to fundamental mathematics theorems and proofs? Or was it elegant because those pioneers were scratching at the easy surface of mathematics where things were simpler and more elegant, and that modern researchers are forced to delve deeper for new veins of insight, into the bowels were balrogs lie?
Regardless, he was still stumped by the belief that physics should be aesthetic. Indeed. However, perhaps the esthetic of modern physics is like the esthetic of impressionist or modern art, and Einstein was like people who grew up with pre-impressionist art and couldn't adjust.
Well, the computer evolved over time with various changes made by various individuals and organizations. Gordon Moore didn't just wake up one morning in the 1970's and decide
"I'm going to make a multi-core, super-parallel, super-scalar microprocessor and call it the Intel Core Duo", and he saw that it was good!
In fact it's taken decades for thousands of engineers working at hundreds of corporations to perform a combination of design and trial and error to arrive at the point where we are now. And along the way, many processor designs like the z80, the i860, the M68K and M88K, the Itanium, the early SPARCs, and the MIPS R*000, rose, died, or eked out a living in niche markets, and the company ecosystems that created and supplied them did the same. I won't even get into all the companies that produced the hardware/software in fabs to make those processors.
Now certainly part of that development process was designed, but even that part involved lots of trial and error through debugging runs selecting out design flaws through QA testing for "correct" (i.e. more fit) results. And there's also all the trial and error involved in materials/process research for figuring out how to advance fabrication techniques. Intelligence guided the process so that hundreds or thousands, instead of billions or trillions or more, of combinations were tried, but trial and error was still a factor. With processor design, engineer/researcher communication, patents, and other forms of knowledge transfer were part of the highly accelerated equivalent of genetic exchange through sexual reproduction or retro-viral infections.
While we've used design to accelerate an evolutionary process to where it's taken us decades to produce a current processor, the universe has had billions of years and an unthinkably large variety and number of organisms to produce human beings through a thoroughly random process.
So you're wrong. The modern day processor, and how it came to be built, gives me more confidence in the theory of evolution over creationism, not the other way around. Now, how the Universe came about, that's a big unanswered question and there's still lots of room for a Creator in that story. But Creationism and an interventionist God? You'll need a lot more than your flimsy unsupported one line argument to convince me.
First, the oil sands extraction is more for export to the US than for domestic consumption. It plays a big part in our trade balance with the US, but it's something we could sell to China too. But you certainly got the wrong idea if you think I'm pro oil sands. From what I hear, CO2 generation is the least of the pollution produced by oil sands operations.
I brought up using nuke plants to extract oil from oil sands because you had joked about nuking Alberta. However, while it's certainly feasible, the costs involved with operational and security protocols for fissile materials make it much more expensive than burning natural gas. That's why the oil companies invested in tar sands (and the Alberta government) are so adamantly against it. Such a change would eliminate a lot of their profit.
It's also why the Canadian federal government isn't doing anything. A large portion of the power base of the Conservative party currently in power is the old Canadian Alliance voters located primarily in Alberta and other plains provinces. They aren't going to alienate their loyal voters by doing anything that could damage the booming Alberta economy. We'll see how long it takes for the rest of Canada to figure that out and put the Liberals back in power again.
Electrical production in BC is mostly hydro now, apart for Burrard (natural gas) Thermal. Most of B.C.'s coal goes to japan/other asian markets, and a substantial portion of our natural gas goes down to the US. We do use natural gas for heating a fair bit; if we were to phase out natural gas heating, we would have to substantially increase electrical production. BC Hydro's Power Smart program has been useful in limiting the growth in energy consumption from an increasing population. Otherwise, while Gordon Campbell talks a good game because he knows the B.C. population is quite concerned about GW/CC, we've yet to see some serious money being put into effective initiatives.
A huge portion of Alberta's carbon consumption comes from burning gas to heat water and extract oil from tar sands. I heard some rumours of research on using nuke power to supply the heat for the tar sands project but I guess our equivalent of the DoE has been reluctant to give the go ahead. The oil companies involved in tar sands projects also aren't too keen on the idea because natural gas is a heck of a lot cheaper to burn compared to running nuke thermal plants.
Apparently, it's not the cross-the-bridge function that's the problem, that still works fine. The problem is with pulling the soil-tiller attached to your tractor while on the main road and occasionally tearing up the asphalt. For some reason, people have begun to think it's not a great idea and causes some problems. There's talk of some new laws being passed to prevent that from happening even though you've gotten away with it the last few years while moving your tractor from one field to another.
Actually, you're partly right. Pulling the soil-tiller across the bridge and tearing up holes in it won't be supported either.
Or maybe if you find that a little too ludicrous, you'd rather consider evolving pollution emission standards for cars instead?
I believe the question was: "If they never had a label, would they have had a chance in hell at becoming popular enough to sell that many albums online?" No, but only because Payola is alive and well, and the labels have understandings with the large media conglomerates that control most of the radio stations and musical airplay.
The point however, is that radio is no longer anywhere near as major a player and bottleneck in the popularization of music that it was in the 90's and prior and that monopoly on airplay isn't as important as it used to be.
Julius Caesar was no bible thumper, but under him, the Romans practiced a particularly vile form of ethnic cleansing in Gaul. True, Caesar did kill a lot of people in Gaul. And the Romans also razed Carthage and salted the lands around it. But part of that was also motivated by the fact that a lot of those peoples that they most viciously attacked were peoples that performed ritual human sacrifice of captives as a part of their religion. If you want to stamp out that kind of a religious practice, it's a lot easier if you make a strong impression. And losing citizens regularly to border incursions for human sacrifices is a pretty strong motivator. It tends to get people riled up.
I'm sorry. Are you saying that in the United States Christians have the power to realistically threaten non-believers with assault, torture, and death? Have you ever actually been here?!
I don't think that kind of behaviour would be done openly. But I wouldn't go announcing to everyone that I'm agnostic in certain parts of Missouri, Louisiana and some other south/central states. There would certainly be some people who might consider atheists a fair target for harassment or assault when they were drunk (and maybe even when sober). They certainly go about beating gays and lesbians and vandalizing their property, don't they? You really think doing the same things to atheists is a big stretch?
Certainly, it's a minority view and most USA citizens are very friendly and decent. But the inquisition was just a small group too.
No, an extremely atheistic society would persecute anybody who believed in a religion. Soviet Russia or 50s/60s Communist China could be considered extremely atheistic. Western Europe is quite moderately atheistic/agnostic.
People who think Western Europe is extremely atheistic also probably think Fox News is "Fair and Balanced".
Yeah, yeah I know. In Soviet Russia, the extreme atheists persecute you.
I know that if I don't like a charity or church, I can give my money to someone else... do you know how I can give my money to a competing government if I don't like the way it's run? Yes, you can vote to replace your government with someone who will cancel the program you hate so much.
What's that you say? You're outvoted and still have to pay taxes, something that doesn't happen in the private/religious sector?
Hmm, I guess you stopped getting telephone service in the 70's and also wouldn't have bought gas from Standard Oil in the early 1900's when people realized how they were ripping everybody off. After all, government regulation of markets isn't a necessary government function. People can just take their money elsewhere.
A lot of charities are run by churches because it gives them a chance to proselytize. And religious people don't like government programs that are competition to those charities because most people in need want help, not somebody preaching homilies at them. The government competition in providing those services makes the religious charities less attractive.
But fundamentally, government programs like the ones started with the New Deal came about because charities and church groups weren't enough during the Great Depression, they weren't enough during the Industrial Revolution, and they weren't enough for many of the thousands of years before that. However fortunately, unlike during the previous countless millenia, enough people have now recognized that it is to the general advantage of all the members of society, through greater social stability and better opportunity and development for its human capital, to provide those services.
Except for those with a high opinion of themselves who want enough other people to be desperate enough that they can have servants and sycophants to validate that opinion. Not realizing how, often, mere chance separates them from the role they would see others fill.
My point is that law enforcement is all about behaviour modification too. Law enforcement and sin taxes are two different tools to achieve similar goals.
It doesn't make sense to charge large taxes on someone stealing or committing murder. However there are certain behaviours that are currently dealt with through police/criminal enforcement that could be better addressed through taxation and education to encourage behaviour modification.
If people are committing antisocial or self-destructive behaviour, it's more effective to dissuade them from that behaviour early than to wait until they're in the gutter to throw them in the slammer. By that point behaviour patterns have had time to get much more strongly set and are that much harder to break. A stitch in time saves nine and so on.
If you're guilty about a pleasure, it's because you know it has some negative effects. If you're willing to accept the consequences, then you'll be willing to pay the added price. Sin taxes are generally about making sure that society doesn't pay an excessive portion of the price for your guilty pleasure. Or for mine.
My point is that there will always be (more or less valid) reasons to modify other people's behaviours. If police and criminal law is the only tool people have, that's the tool they'll use, with possibly unintended consequences (see prohibition in the 30's and how it fostered the rise of organized crime). So saying you only want to pay for police and FD doesn't fix the underlying problem of excessive government intervention.
I would rather that the government have a range of tools at its disposal. I wouldn't impose on a contractor that the only tools he's allowed to use to build a house is a hammer and a chisel. I would be a lot more concerned about enough oversight to make sure he's honest and sufficiently experienced to use power tools and cranes if appropriate instead of charging me for doing everything with a hammer and chisel.
Paying the police and fire department? Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people can agree reasonable taxation to provide for that is fair. Sin taxes to try to control someone else's behavior? Not so good, IMO. Does paying the police/defense department include supporting the War on Drugs, secret wiretaps "to catch terrorists". Because you know what, those are all about trying to control someone's behaviour too (as, fundamentally, is all of police/justice work).
A lot of people would disagree and think that sin taxes funding detoxification programs would be a hell of a better way to modify behaviour than the War on Drugs. One destroys lives and provides opportunities for organized crime whereas the other approach can help rebuild them.
But, hey, don't let results and observations conflict with your ideology.
You might want to try using a fountain pen instead of ball-points. Although I do use ball points now since I only write longhand occasionally, I used a fountain pen through most of high school and university. Because you're only lightly stroking the page with a fountain pen, there's a lot less tension on your hand and wrist when you write. Even so, I would still buy a new pen every year or two because I would eventually wear out nibs (particularly the 'fine' nibs) enough that they would start to catch the paper.
You do have to be a little more careful about smudging the fresh ink but, unless you're left-handed or taking notes in Hebrew, it's not too much of a problem.
I also had some problems with my right wrist and computers when I was taking classes in Tai Chi (and a bit of Kun Wu) sword that would get aggravated by computer work. Sadly, I eventually had to drop the classes. My wrists started getting better after switching to a wired optical mouse and ergonomic keyboard.
Well, if we had nanotechnology that could make diamondoid structural materials, wing-sized monomolecular graphite sheets, and multi-meter nanotube cables, then you could probably pull off some decent highly-collapsible wings. At that point, you've probably also got either vacuum fluctuation or molecular distortion batteries powerful enough to power electric motors that can be re-configured to drive either wheels or a propeller.
I'll tell you one thing I don't like about Fox News though: Alan Colmes. Not because he's liberal, but because his schtick is to give Hannity a hard time. Half the time I don't believe he even believes what he's saying. He does exactly the sort of Democrat cheerleading that MSNBC does except not as well.
Of course he doesn't do it as well. He's a straw man meant to reinforce your prejudices about liberals as being effete and incompetent. You don't think Fox would actually hire a competent liberal who could show up Hannity as the trollish buffoon he is, do you? Come on! Fox have an agenda to sell and competent liberals can get a better job than as a punching bag on Fox News.
What the FCC really needs is a moderating mechanisms where the 90% of the American people that wouldn't get caught dead being associated with said ultra-conservative lobbying group can vote on those complaints as being specious and trollish.
If 20 or 100 times as many people would find ridiculous a complaint about a particular show, as compared to the number of people who actually complained about that show, then those complaints should be summarily dismissed.
The problem is that most people right now have no way of knowing what those complaints are and saying "Heck, I watched that show. It was fine and those idiots don't know what they're talking about. They probably never even watched the show and only wrote in because their fundamentalist preacher told them to during his Sunday sermon."
Ah, but smokers tend to be the kind of person that is susceptible to addictions, including drinking alcohol. And alcoholic drinks tend to be where restaurants make most of their money because it has the most markup. So there is a huge financial pressure on restaurants to allow smoking to attract the addicts, oops smokers, because that's where the majority of the profit lies. Thus, in spite of the owners' preference to run a non-smoking restaurant for their health and the health of their staff, economics may dictate otherwise because they may not be able to compete otherwise. But if all restaurants are non-smoking, then the addicts go out and eat and drink anyways.
So yes, the "choice" of the addicts is restricted to improve the option of everybody else (who actually form the majority). And restricting their choice restricts their selfish desires that harm others.
The real reason why so many nerds are libertarians is that many of them are really quite selfish people, with little empathy for (their impact on) others outside their very small immediate circle of friends, and who have never learned some basics of living in society. They are unwilling to admit that their actions have negative impacts on others if it means accepting limitations on their actions.
Nope. You'll need a new generation which has grown up in that environment and is willing to risk its privileges because they aren't afraid of being sent back to the farms. You also need a generation of administrators who have "grown soft" with the benefits of an industrial society and aren't willing to go back to a subsistence economy. There's a reason why Mao sent all the middle class people back to collective farms for a few decades: to disperse them and limit their ability to organize a counterrevolution by surrounding them with people who resented their previous advantages, sure, but also to give them something to be afraid of. To let them know they weren't indispensable and that there was something worse than "death for a few".
That's the real problem with Islamic fundamentalists. A lot of them really think that going beck to rules designed for nomadic herdsmen is a good idea. Those ideas find fertile ground in people living at subsistence levels from not-so-fertile lands. The West (the USA in particular) is badly set up to deal with that since its power structures are set up to favor moneyed interests that want (or at best don't care about) a poor underclass to provide a constant source of cheap labor for industry. Unless the USA citizens wise up, it's likely to take at least one nuked Western city and a few decades of useless wars and dead soldiers before they wise up and demand fundamental changes in how to deal with the root causes of the problem.
The amount of Chinese living in China and abroad that supported and still support this action. And I'm not talking about the Chinese equivalent of a redneck - I'm talking about smart, educated people who just happen to think that western-style democracy will destroy China. It's not clear that they're not wrong. Look at the USA. You have a poorly informed electorate (because the majority of public information sources are controlled by a few right-leaning corporate interests instead of a political party). Legislation is controlled by special interest groups that use money to warp the political process in favour of the rich and at the expense of the populace. Why should Party officials give up their positions of power for a change of oligarchy to corporate masters? Probably a good number of the intelligentsia can convince themselves that they are the only things that stands between China and even worse worker exploitation by external corporations, more corruption of public officials (look at Russia for an example of a failed communist->democratic capitalist transition), Malthusian disaster through the inevitable repeal of one-child laws and penalties, etc.
And for the next 30 years, while they continue a demographic transition from a mainly agrarian, pseudo-feudal society to an industrialized society, it's not clear that they're wrong.
The execution of the minister responsible for the equivalent of the FDA shows how seriously the Chinese Party takes the current quality scandal. For instance, that's an improvement over what happens in the USA where some low-level bureaucrat would have been hung out to dry, the minister in question probably would have been told "Great job, Chuy!" and given the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and if that failed and complaints continued, charged and convicted of corruption, given a 5 year sentence, and then pardoned before serving a day.
a) Um, let's not forget that a good proportion of the 750 annual bicycle deaths are probably due to head or neck injuries that often would be reduced by a bicycle helmet. b) If costs for brain injuries are much higher than other hospital-worthy injuries (say >$1Million over the life of the cyclist vs. $2000 - it's probably even more dramatic if you count lost productivity) then that could still significantly offset its relatively low probability. c) People break hips and bones in bathtubs. They don't tend to cause serious brain injuries as much because the speeds of impact/accelerations involved in bathtub falls are relatively low as compared to bicycle accidents. There are a number who die from drowning from falling - or just falling asleep - in a full tub (personally, I take showers in the bathtub so I'm not too worried). That also doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful in the bathtub, just that your risks of lifelong traumatic brain injury with a high cost to society are lower. Bathtub accidents also happen more often to people with poor balance (i.e. sick or older folks, pregnant women) whom you can target for extra precautions.
The argument is that most bone and soft tissue damage heals over time and teaches the injured party to be more careful next time. Brain injuries often have severe, long lasting effects that impact productivity, earning potential, and long term costs to society if extended medical care is required.
Look at it this way, bicycle riding, like driving a car, is an activity that has certain risks with expensive long term consequences. 70% of 300 million people in the US have driver's licences, about 3 times the number of cyclists. Now, certainly there's a lot more motor vehicle fatalities than bicycle fatalities (50 times at 40,000 vs 750) but it's worthwhile mandating $1500 worth of seatbelts and airbag additions to each car to reduce those fatalities and injuries in millions of others. That's >50 times more expensive than the $25 bike helmet you and your kid are expected to wear for a lower expected value return in terms of cost savings to society.
So by your argument, the government shouldn't mandate seatbelts or airbags (or motorcycle helmets) either. You are welcome to that opinion, but I don't think those ideas would get much traction these days among educated people either, thank goodness. Fortunately, those making those decisions don't share your opinion.
So sure you guys wiped out multiple times when you were kids and didn't get hurt. that has nothing to do with what I wrote. What kills people and seriously injures people in bicycle accidents isn't the ground that is traveling at a relative velocity of 15MPH when the slide out on the bike, it's the vehicle T-Boning or side swiping them at 35MPH, or the hoods and tempered windshields that are a lot harder than dirt.
A higher proportion of the population live in urban environments than even 20 years ago (let alone 30 or 40 years), and those environments have more cars sharing the road with those bikes than 20 years ago, so you can expect a higher rate of injuries from bicyclists being hit by motor vehicles just because the number of possible encounter situations have increased proportionately. And if you think cutting the number of brain injuries by 45% to 88% isn't often, then I'd like to know what is. Because while bicycle accidents may only compose about 1.8% of motor vehicle accident deaths, there's also a lot fewer bikes on the road than trucks or cars. So while legally requiring bike helmet use doesn't make a big difference in the number of vehicle deaths, it does make a significant difference in the number of deaths and serious head injuries for cyclists.
Then again, maybe letting people who refuse to understand that allow their kids ride around on streets without bike helmets would help clean up the gene pool.
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His belief that the world was ordered came from his deeper belief that there is a sentient creator.
I'm not sure about that. Many mathematicians like proofs or concepts to have a certain elegance or clarity. That's probably because a lot of pioneering mathematics work was elegant. However, was that early work elegant because there's necessarily elegance to fundamental mathematics theorems and proofs? Or was it elegant because those pioneers were scratching at the easy surface of mathematics where things were simpler and more elegant, and that modern researchers are forced to delve deeper for new veins of insight, into the bowels were balrogs lie?
Regardless, he was still stumped by the belief that physics should be aesthetic.
Indeed. However, perhaps the esthetic of modern physics is like the esthetic of impressionist or modern art, and Einstein was like people who grew up with pre-impressionist art and couldn't adjust.
Well, the computer evolved over time with various changes made by various individuals and organizations. Gordon Moore didn't just wake up one morning in the 1970's and decide
"I'm going to make a multi-core, super-parallel, super-scalar microprocessor and call it the Intel Core Duo", and he saw that it was good!
In fact it's taken decades for thousands of engineers working at hundreds of corporations to perform a combination of design and trial and error to arrive at the point where we are now. And along the way, many processor designs like the z80, the i860, the M68K and M88K, the Itanium, the early SPARCs, and the MIPS R*000, rose, died, or eked out a living in niche markets, and the company ecosystems that created and supplied them did the same. I won't even get into all the companies that produced the hardware/software in fabs to make those processors.
Now certainly part of that development process was designed, but even that part involved lots of trial and error through debugging runs selecting out design flaws through QA testing for "correct" (i.e. more fit) results. And there's also all the trial and error involved in materials/process research for figuring out how to advance fabrication techniques. Intelligence guided the process so that hundreds or thousands, instead of billions or trillions or more, of combinations were tried, but trial and error was still a factor. With processor design, engineer/researcher communication, patents, and other forms of knowledge transfer were part of the highly accelerated equivalent of genetic exchange through sexual reproduction or retro-viral infections.
While we've used design to accelerate an evolutionary process to where it's taken us decades to produce a current processor, the universe has had billions of years and an unthinkably large variety and number of organisms to produce human beings through a thoroughly random process.
So you're wrong. The modern day processor, and how it came to be built, gives me more confidence in the theory of evolution over creationism, not the other way around. Now, how the Universe came about, that's a big unanswered question and there's still lots of room for a Creator in that story. But Creationism and an interventionist God? You'll need a lot more than your flimsy unsupported one line argument to convince me.
First, the oil sands extraction is more for export to the US than for domestic consumption. It plays a big part in our trade balance with the US, but it's something we could sell to China too. But you certainly got the wrong idea if you think I'm pro oil sands. From what I hear, CO2 generation is the least of the pollution produced by oil sands operations.
I brought up using nuke plants to extract oil from oil sands because you had joked about nuking Alberta. However, while it's certainly feasible, the costs involved with operational and security protocols for fissile materials make it much more expensive than burning natural gas. That's why the oil companies invested in tar sands (and the Alberta government) are so adamantly against it. Such a change would eliminate a lot of their profit.
It's also why the Canadian federal government isn't doing anything. A large portion of the power base of the Conservative party currently in power is the old Canadian Alliance voters located primarily in Alberta and other plains provinces. They aren't going to alienate their loyal voters by doing anything that could damage the booming Alberta economy. We'll see how long it takes for the rest of Canada to figure that out and put the Liberals back in power again.
Electrical production in BC is mostly hydro now, apart for Burrard (natural gas) Thermal. Most of B.C.'s coal goes to japan/other asian markets, and a substantial portion of our natural gas goes down to the US. We do use natural gas for heating a fair bit; if we were to phase out natural gas heating, we would have to substantially increase electrical production. BC Hydro's Power Smart program has been useful in limiting the growth in energy consumption from an increasing population. Otherwise, while Gordon Campbell talks a good game because he knows the B.C. population is quite concerned about GW/CC, we've yet to see some serious money being put into effective initiatives.
A huge portion of Alberta's carbon consumption comes from burning gas to heat water and extract oil from tar sands. I heard some rumours of research on using nuke power to supply the heat for the tar sands project but I guess our equivalent of the DoE has been reluctant to give the go ahead. The oil companies involved in tar sands projects also aren't too keen on the idea because natural gas is a heck of a lot cheaper to burn compared to running nuke thermal plants.
Apparently, it's not the cross-the-bridge function that's the problem, that still works fine. The problem is with pulling the soil-tiller attached to your tractor while on the main road and occasionally tearing up the asphalt. For some reason, people have begun to think it's not a great idea and causes some problems. There's talk of some new laws being passed to prevent that from happening even though you've gotten away with it the last few years while moving your tractor from one field to another.
Actually, you're partly right. Pulling the soil-tiller across the bridge and tearing up holes in it won't be supported either.
Or maybe if you find that a little too ludicrous, you'd rather consider evolving pollution emission standards for cars instead?
for Heroic Human.
Um, Holy Heron? Hungry Hippopotamus? Hentai Hamster?
I believe the question was: "If they never had a label, would they have had a chance in hell at becoming popular enough to sell that many albums online?"
No, but only because Payola is alive and well, and the labels have understandings with the large media conglomerates that control most of the radio stations and musical airplay.
The point however, is that radio is no longer anywhere near as major a player and bottleneck in the popularization of music that it was in the 90's and prior and that monopoly on airplay isn't as important as it used to be.
Julius Caesar was no bible thumper, but under him, the Romans practiced a particularly vile form of ethnic cleansing in Gaul.
True, Caesar did kill a lot of people in Gaul. And the Romans also razed Carthage and salted the lands around it. But part of that was also motivated by the fact that a lot of those peoples that they most viciously attacked were peoples that performed ritual human sacrifice of captives as a part of their religion . If you want to stamp out that kind of a religious practice, it's a lot easier if you make a strong impression. And losing citizens regularly to border incursions for human sacrifices is a pretty strong motivator. It tends to get people riled up.
I'm sorry. Are you saying that in the United States Christians have the power to realistically threaten non-believers with assault, torture, and death? Have you ever actually been here?!
I don't think that kind of behaviour would be done openly. But I wouldn't go announcing to everyone that I'm agnostic in certain parts of Missouri, Louisiana and some other south/central states. There would certainly be some people who might consider atheists a fair target for harassment or assault when they were drunk (and maybe even when sober). They certainly go about beating gays and lesbians and vandalizing their property, don't they? You really think doing the same things to atheists is a big stretch?
Certainly, it's a minority view and most USA citizens are very friendly and decent. But the inquisition was just a small group too.
No, an extremely atheistic society would persecute anybody who believed in a religion. Soviet Russia or 50s/60s Communist China could be considered extremely atheistic. Western Europe is quite moderately atheistic/agnostic.
People who think Western Europe is extremely atheistic also probably think Fox News is "Fair and Balanced".
Yeah, yeah I know. In Soviet Russia, the extreme atheists persecute you.
I know that if I don't like a charity or church, I can give my money to someone else... do you know how I can give my money to a competing government if I don't like the way it's run?
Yes, you can vote to replace your government with someone who will cancel the program you hate so much.
What's that you say? You're outvoted and still have to pay taxes, something that doesn't happen in the private/religious sector?
Hmm, I guess you stopped getting telephone service in the 70's and also wouldn't have bought gas from Standard Oil in the early 1900's when people realized how they were ripping everybody off. After all, government regulation of markets isn't a necessary government function. People can just take their money elsewhere.
A lot of charities are run by churches because it gives them a chance to proselytize. And religious people don't like government programs that are competition to those charities because most people in need want help, not somebody preaching homilies at them. The government competition in providing those services makes the religious charities less attractive.
But fundamentally, government programs like the ones started with the New Deal came about because charities and church groups weren't enough during the Great Depression, they weren't enough during the Industrial Revolution, and they weren't enough for many of the thousands of years before that. However fortunately, unlike during the previous countless millenia, enough people have now recognized that it is to the general advantage of all the members of society, through greater social stability and better opportunity and development for its human capital, to provide those services.
Except for those with a high opinion of themselves who want enough other people to be desperate enough that they can have servants and sycophants to validate that opinion. Not realizing how, often, mere chance separates them from the role they would see others fill.
My point is that law enforcement is all about behaviour modification too. Law enforcement and sin taxes are two different tools to achieve similar goals.
It doesn't make sense to charge large taxes on someone stealing or committing murder. However there are certain behaviours that are currently dealt with through police/criminal enforcement that could be better addressed through taxation and education to encourage behaviour modification.
If people are committing antisocial or self-destructive behaviour, it's more effective to dissuade them from that behaviour early than to wait until they're in the gutter to throw them in the slammer. By that point behaviour patterns have had time to get much more strongly set and are that much harder to break. A stitch in time saves nine and so on.
If you're guilty about a pleasure, it's because you know it has some negative effects. If you're willing to accept the consequences, then you'll be willing to pay the added price. Sin taxes are generally about making sure that society doesn't pay an excessive portion of the price for your guilty pleasure. Or for mine.
My point is that there will always be (more or less valid) reasons to modify other people's behaviours. If police and criminal law is the only tool people have, that's the tool they'll use, with possibly unintended consequences (see prohibition in the 30's and how it fostered the rise of organized crime). So saying you only want to pay for police and FD doesn't fix the underlying problem of excessive government intervention.
I would rather that the government have a range of tools at its disposal. I wouldn't impose on a contractor that the only tools he's allowed to use to build a house is a hammer and a chisel. I would be a lot more concerned about enough oversight to make sure he's honest and sufficiently experienced to use power tools and cranes if appropriate instead of charging me for doing everything with a hammer and chisel.
Paying the police and fire department? Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people can agree reasonable taxation to provide for that is fair. Sin taxes to try to control someone else's behavior? Not so good, IMO.
Does paying the police/defense department include supporting the War on Drugs, secret wiretaps "to catch terrorists". Because you know what, those are all about trying to control someone's behaviour too (as, fundamentally, is all of police/justice work).
A lot of people would disagree and think that sin taxes funding detoxification programs would be a hell of a better way to modify behaviour than the War on Drugs. One destroys lives and provides opportunities for organized crime whereas the other approach can help rebuild them.
But, hey, don't let results and observations conflict with your ideology.
You might want to try using a fountain pen instead of ball-points. Although I do use ball points now since I only write longhand occasionally, I used a fountain pen through most of high school and university. Because you're only lightly stroking the page with a fountain pen, there's a lot less tension on your hand and wrist when you write. Even so, I would still buy a new pen every year or two because I would eventually wear out nibs (particularly the 'fine' nibs) enough that they would start to catch the paper.
You do have to be a little more careful about smudging the fresh ink but, unless you're left-handed or taking notes in Hebrew, it's not too much of a problem.
I also had some problems with my right wrist and computers when I was taking classes in Tai Chi (and a bit of Kun Wu) sword that would get aggravated by computer work. Sadly, I eventually had to drop the classes. My wrists started getting better after switching to a wired optical mouse and ergonomic keyboard.
Well, if we had nanotechnology that could make diamondoid structural materials, wing-sized monomolecular graphite sheets, and multi-meter nanotube cables, then you could probably pull off some decent highly-collapsible wings. At that point, you've probably also got either vacuum fluctuation or molecular distortion batteries powerful enough to power electric motors that can be re-configured to drive either wheels or a propeller.
So probably another 50-100 year wait.
What the FCC really needs is a moderating mechanisms where the 90% of the American people that wouldn't get caught dead being associated with said ultra-conservative lobbying group can vote on those complaints as being specious and trollish.
If 20 or 100 times as many people would find ridiculous a complaint about a particular show, as compared to the number of people who actually complained about that show, then those complaints should be summarily dismissed.
The problem is that most people right now have no way of knowing what those complaints are and saying "Heck, I watched that show. It was fine and those idiots don't know what they're talking about. They probably never even watched the show and only wrote in because their fundamentalist preacher told them to during his Sunday sermon."
Ah, but smokers tend to be the kind of person that is susceptible to addictions, including drinking alcohol. And alcoholic drinks tend to be where restaurants make most of their money because it has the most markup. So there is a huge financial pressure on restaurants to allow smoking to attract the addicts, oops smokers, because that's where the majority of the profit lies. Thus, in spite of the owners' preference to run a non-smoking restaurant for their health and the health of their staff, economics may dictate otherwise because they may not be able to compete otherwise. But if all restaurants are non-smoking, then the addicts go out and eat and drink anyways.
So yes, the "choice" of the addicts is restricted to improve the option of everybody else (who actually form the majority). And restricting their choice restricts their selfish desires that harm others.
The real reason why so many nerds are libertarians is that many of them are really quite selfish people, with little empathy for (their impact on) others outside their very small immediate circle of friends, and who have never learned some basics of living in society. They are unwilling to admit that their actions have negative impacts on others if it means accepting limitations on their actions.
You're Mr. Incredible!
Nope. You'll need a new generation which has grown up in that environment and is willing to risk its privileges because they aren't afraid of being sent back to the farms. You also need a generation of administrators who have "grown soft" with the benefits of an industrial society and aren't willing to go back to a subsistence economy. There's a reason why Mao sent all the middle class people back to collective farms for a few decades: to disperse them and limit their ability to organize a counterrevolution by surrounding them with people who resented their previous advantages, sure, but also to give them something to be afraid of. To let them know they weren't indispensable and that there was something worse than "death for a few".
That's the real problem with Islamic fundamentalists. A lot of them really think that going beck to rules designed for nomadic herdsmen is a good idea. Those ideas find fertile ground in people living at subsistence levels from not-so-fertile lands. The West (the USA in particular) is badly set up to deal with that since its power structures are set up to favor moneyed interests that want (or at best don't care about) a poor underclass to provide a constant source of cheap labor for industry. Unless the USA citizens wise up, it's likely to take at least one nuked Western city and a few decades of useless wars and dead soldiers before they wise up and demand fundamental changes in how to deal with the root causes of the problem.
The amount of Chinese living in China and abroad that supported and still support this action. And I'm not talking about the Chinese equivalent of a redneck - I'm talking about smart, educated people who just happen to think that western-style democracy will destroy China.
It's not clear that they're not wrong. Look at the USA. You have a poorly informed electorate (because the majority of public information sources are controlled by a few right-leaning corporate interests instead of a political party). Legislation is controlled by special interest groups that use money to warp the political process in favour of the rich and at the expense of the populace. Why should Party officials give up their positions of power for a change of oligarchy to corporate masters? Probably a good number of the intelligentsia can convince themselves that they are the only things that stands between China and even worse worker exploitation by external corporations, more corruption of public officials (look at Russia for an example of a failed communist->democratic capitalist transition), Malthusian disaster through the inevitable repeal of one-child laws and penalties, etc.
And for the next 30 years, while they continue a demographic transition from a mainly agrarian, pseudo-feudal society to an industrialized society, it's not clear that they're wrong.
The execution of the minister responsible for the equivalent of the FDA shows how seriously the Chinese Party takes the current quality scandal.
For instance, that's an improvement over what happens in the USA where some low-level bureaucrat would have been hung out to dry, the minister in question probably would have been told "Great job, Chuy!" and given the Congressional Medal of Freedom, and if that failed and complaints continued, charged and convicted of corruption, given a 5 year sentence, and then pardoned before serving a day.
Yeah, it does sound a little like this (scroll down a bit to "Y'ALL KEWL BOMB DOODZ")
It's the Misliks' work.
a) Um, let's not forget that a good proportion of the 750 annual bicycle deaths are probably due to head or neck injuries that often would be reduced by a bicycle helmet.
b) If costs for brain injuries are much higher than other hospital-worthy injuries (say >$1Million over the life of the cyclist vs. $2000 - it's probably even more dramatic if you count lost productivity) then that could still significantly offset its relatively low probability.
c) People break hips and bones in bathtubs. They don't tend to cause serious brain injuries as much because the speeds of impact/accelerations involved in bathtub falls are relatively low as compared to bicycle accidents. There are a number who die from drowning from falling - or just falling asleep - in a full tub (personally, I take showers in the bathtub so I'm not too worried). That also doesn't mean you shouldn't be careful in the bathtub, just that your risks of lifelong traumatic brain injury with a high cost to society are lower. Bathtub accidents also happen more often to people with poor balance (i.e. sick or older folks, pregnant women) whom you can target for extra precautions.
The argument is that most bone and soft tissue damage heals over time and teaches the injured party to be more careful next time. Brain injuries often have severe, long lasting effects that impact productivity, earning potential, and long term costs to society if extended medical care is required.
Look at it this way, bicycle riding, like driving a car, is an activity that has certain risks with expensive long term consequences. 70% of 300 million people in the US have driver's licences, about 3 times the number of cyclists. Now, certainly there's a lot more motor vehicle fatalities than bicycle fatalities (50 times at 40,000 vs 750) but it's worthwhile mandating $1500 worth of seatbelts and airbag additions to each car to reduce those fatalities and injuries in millions of others. That's >50 times more expensive than the $25 bike helmet you and your kid are expected to wear for a lower expected value return in terms of cost savings to society.
So by your argument, the government shouldn't mandate seatbelts or airbags (or motorcycle helmets) either. You are welcome to that opinion, but I don't think those ideas would get much traction these days among educated people either, thank goodness. Fortunately, those making those decisions don't share your opinion.
See more here
See here.
So sure you guys wiped out multiple times when you were kids and didn't get hurt. that has nothing to do with what I wrote. What kills people and seriously injures people in bicycle accidents isn't the ground that is traveling at a relative velocity of 15MPH when the slide out on the bike, it's the vehicle T-Boning or side swiping them at 35MPH, or the hoods and tempered windshields that are a lot harder than dirt.
A higher proportion of the population live in urban environments than even 20 years ago (let alone 30 or 40 years), and those environments have more cars sharing the road with those bikes than 20 years ago, so you can expect a higher rate of injuries from bicyclists being hit by motor vehicles just because the number of possible encounter situations have increased proportionately. And if you think cutting the number of brain injuries by 45% to 88% isn't often, then I'd like to know what is. Because while bicycle accidents may only compose about 1.8% of motor vehicle accident deaths, there's also a lot fewer bikes on the road than trucks or cars. So while legally requiring bike helmet use doesn't make a big difference in the number of vehicle deaths, it does make a significant difference in the number of deaths and serious head injuries for cyclists.
Then again, maybe letting people who refuse to understand that allow their kids ride around on streets without bike helmets would help clean up the gene pool.