I didn't mention anything about evolution in my post nor did I say anything about the world being too good. The universe, what is seen and unseen as a whole, the design of that is too good. Which of course humans and everything else in it are part of the design. I was in the camp you are in now once too, that is why I say over time as one examines more of the Universe and all its components, including people, not just the basic parts studied in a vacuum, one tends toward seeing the brilliance of the design. Why? Because it is brilliant and better than anything any human has ever come up with or created.
If you simply do not believe in God then of course we have two very different models in our head of the Universe, who created it, our place in it (humans), etc. You never actually said if you believe God created the Universe or not in your post though.
Your degree helped you get a job. Your real learning for that job you did on your own. Oh and you think people who go to ITT are intellectually equivalent to monkey's which goes right to the root of anti-intellectualism which is someone like you thinking you are intellectually superior than someone else because your piece of paper is bigger than theirs.
Excellent post. In school I always kept it in my mind that learning the subject very well was my main goal. I did not cheat, partly because I had this in mind partly because I was too lazy to and partly because I didn't care if my GPA went up a tenth of a point or not. I didn't care if it went up a tenth of a point because I wanted to learn the subjects well first of all.
Every one of my friends I knew and all other people I knew in class, cheated and cheated regularly. So why would I, who am not going to cheat think I could compete againt their GPA's? I couldn't, but in the real world I knew eventually I would be going up against these weanies in the marketplace doing a real job and I would have more knowledge and do better than them despite my not stellar GPA. To this day my theory has proved correct.
I feel the important part of a life of learning is learning how to teach yourself from the resources out there. About 80% of the teachers seem to be of poor quality and seem to just teach for some extra money, are professors just to write papers, or do not want to be out in the job marketplace. I can't say I disagree with them out in the real job marketplace it sux but that is why they are there. For the rest of the teachers who are excited about what they are teaching and want people to learn about it, God bless you because I have had some great teachers that add to making society a much better place with their skill in the classroom.
Point is I think too many of us have been asked to bow before a mighty teacher that has cheated there way to a good GPA and really does not deserve any respect. Those bad seeds are also part of the problem of growing anti-intellectualism not so much the anti-intellectual Slashdot crowd.
Agreed, I believe that the longer one exists (stays alive) and the more experience they gain, especially if they try to learn about the world around them, the more they will tend toward seeing that the design is just too good to not have intelligence behind it. Not just intelligence but a supreme one greater than we can comprehend.
If you look at Einstein, Romonijin (sp?), Kaku, etc. all of them talk about God and the "why's" God created things the way He did. So for anyone who doesn't think there is an intelligence to the design of the Universe, create one yourself that is better and let me know:-).
We have the major climate apects we see today which are different from quite ancient history primarily due to the Himalaya mountains. Before the expansion up of the Himalaya mountains the earth was much warmer with northern Alaska being actually quite tropical. So was North America for that matter. With the Himalayas removed from computer models and the rest of the Earth elevations and oceans set to as close as we know we see the tropical environment we would expect from the fossil records on the various continents.
If you add the Himalayas, the models show North America much colder, with the gulf stream dipping down like we see today, etc. All of this was on a Discovery or PBS show a while back. I am too lazy to go find a link.
Anyway one may be inclined to think, oh warming everything up will simply offset the Himalayas and we will have nice jungles to run around in all over North America. This is of course not true because you can raise global temp's but the Himalayas are still there.
I am simply advocating better modeling to know what might happen and what actions might work to our advantage.
Is warming really a bad thing? While it sounds like what you say is correct, what if that extra moisture simply means there is more moisture in the atmosphere, meaning more rain, less deserts.
I really don't know which is good or bad and think most scientists don't either. I am surprised there isn't a bigger push for modelling all the different scenarios we think might happen given raising temp's. They might be quite good, they might be horrendous.
If we look at the models and know they are good we may actually want to try and make things even hotter. Like what if we get the whole of the african desert and middle east deserts to get more rain? Of course with technology now we cannot say something like this for sure but I am willing to entertain the idea and keep an open mind about it.
However having an administration in the white house that simply denies that warming is taking place is just stupid. Anyone who knows the concept of numbers can see that. Why don't they just say, you know what it might be better for us all to crank the heat up a bit and here our the models peer reviewed to show that?
If you are getting tax relief, it means you are part of a group that should pay but for some reason you are getting relief.
Church's, Mosque's, Temples's etc. are as far from a group that has to pay taxes as you can get. They DO NOT PAY TAXES in the U.S. and never have. Therefore how could you RELIEVE them of having to pay something that they never did in the first place.
The question on all of this boils down to when it is human (has a soul), not so much life.
So if you don't believe in God then it is unlikely there will be enough common ground to even have a discussion about this because someone will likely not believe in someone having a soul.
So for the atheists, I will not address.
However for the religious, like myself there are still many more questions to this issue. If you do not want usage of embryonic stem sells is it because at this point you believe these cells have a soul?
At this question I think I diverge from most of the religious because I do not believe there is a soul interfaced to this yet and would be fine to use.
So I think it boils down to one of the following:
Soul interfaced at conception
Soul interfaced at cells multiplying
Soul/becomes a human at N'th trimester
Soul interfaced at birth (first breath)
Soul interfaced when brain developed
I find it quite difficult to definitively say any one of those since we do not and probably will never know how the soul interfaces through the human body in terms acceptable to the "prove it to me scientifically" group. I would say we have enough literature from the Torah, Bible, Quran (for the monotheists) to only definitively say the last is obviously false. That once the child is born it is murder to kill it. Which I think every modern culture adheres to now.
The other choices I am sure will be debated for a llllooooNNNNNGGG time to come.
I would consider myself in the group that believes the soul interfaces at birth with first breath. However that does not mean I think abortion is ok which I won't go into all the scenarios for that...
It is a perfectly valid rant. I am more concerned however that the priority now days seems to be helping existing companies squeeze a few extra percentage points of extra profits out of consumers. The government is actively helping them in this endeaver.
I would much rather see government put its weight behind creating new technologies and radical concepts that can in turn create entire industries. Like public space travel/space tourism, space mining, hydrogen powered economy instead of petroleam powered one, fusion reactors, innovative public transit systems, automating more of education and making it cheaper, etc.
Putting extra effort and concentrating time on making sure someone who is already making money makes just a little bit more money is not helping people who aren't making enough money to live, and that is what the role of gov't should be.
Actually the paper trail is needed. You don't let people leave with it though. You have a printout with a bar code or whatever that prints out after they vote then that gets locked up. They can see on the paper who it says they voted for. Then if there is a recount they can unluck all the paper votes and count them. Also any auditor can come back and check on the results using the paper. If the bar codes were tampered with it would be obvious because you could also see on the sheet what the person voted for and the person who voted can also look at this.
but to sum it up, if we could come up with more popular viable other parties it would really fix all my beef's.
Green party is too pro environment and peace for me. There will never in the history of humanity be no war, so to run on that runs against humanity. Sometimes it is necessary.
Libertarian is almost spot on for me except their are some government agencies I would like to see stay. Also too pro legalizing drugs. I don't think the opiate family of drugs (hydrocodone, cocaine, oxycontin, heroine, etc) should be legal for anyone to buy, etc.
So I think we need to create a better party than what we have now. I don't like any of them. I would take that over any system reforms.
A sad, sad day indeed. I guess the lure of higher health insurance costs, lower wages, higher housing costs, higher energy costs, bigger deficits and more layoffs were just too good an offer for the repub's to stay home. I would say I am happy they are going to get what they deserve but the problem is I am going to get what they deserve now too.
Through imaging with Cassini or when Huygens is going down I think a clearly defined pic of a body of liquid would really be something special.
Even though it would not support life and such having something like that there would be amazing. I know it is predicted but I like to think of it in terms of anything we find in our backyard of the Solar System means there are billions probably trillions of things like it and even more amazing out there beyond that.
In the science briefing today a number of the scientists commented on how with the radar data there are no peaks of valleys over 50 meters. The visual is hard to tell the height but with the radar they know.
I'm not complaining about anything- my favored strategy in the war on terror would have Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Jordan, and parts of Egypt glowing in the dark WITHIN 72 HOURS OF THE TOWERS FALLING.
3000 Americans (some not Americans) = kill over 300 million?
Yah, no idea why the rest of the world wants nukes and thinks Americans supporting Bush are stupid and supremicists, no idea at all...
I realize you are exagerating to make a point but keep things in perspective, over 30,000 children die of hunger every day, want to save some lives direct your ignorant rage there for starters.
Well with General Relativity Einstein looks at in terms of a "frame" of reference where if the body is rotating in it you observe a curvature of space and time due to this.
With Teleparallelism it looks at the effect in terms of "flat" space instead of curved space.
I look at in terms of the energy and thus matter that is in a given space distorts the very fabric of space and time thus yielding the effect we call gravity and many other observable things. I don't see anywhere in either theory an expanation why rotation is needed to explain this effect nor why it would have to be. Although in the observable universe all bodies we would encouter would be rotating in relation to at least something else, so it is the norm.
So maybe someone who is more expert at the details of the theories can right me if I am wrong that the rotation qualifier is not actually needed nor correct?
I have to disagree that the rotation of the earth is causing this effect. The same amount of mass would cause this distortion regardless of its' movement.
I think why Cable companies get the "evil" label so much is not so much TWC but because in a lot of markets companies in the past kept buying the smaller companies for more and more money and to finance it simply kept raising rates. TWC seems to be the end of that food chain a lot of the time and from a consumer stand point, people signed up for cable not financing a monopoly crusade.
I would have to give credit to a damn good design for it to be able to roll like that, which it isn't supposed to do and yet it doesn't rip apart and actually still made the altitude.
Liberals tend to value the needs of society above those of the individual, and hence, sacrifice property rights for environmental protection.
I think it has more to do with greed.
You can set aside and manage natural resources for many things including making money on them. Problem comes when a small group or an individual wants to use them and exploits them to the point of destroying them.
I have no problem with mining, logging, whatever, but to do it to the point of completely destroying it for that use so that no wildlife or people can still enjoy it and use it is just greed and stupidity in my opinion. Not just conservative and liberal. I know many conservative, pro gun, hunters that go and use excellent public lands all the time and would do about anything to ensure they are kept useable. It is just common sense.
Only congress has the right to declare war. This is not a war, nor was it sold as one. It was sold as many things (pre-emptive strike, rid Saddam of WMD, fight the terrorists, etc.) but I think the one they say now most often is it was a liberation.
I agree that initially great care was taken to reduce civilian casualties but that too now looks like it is being thrown out the window. Bombing in residential areas is occurring more and more.
I don't see any motivation for people to stay there fighting for much longer. I predict U.S. is for the most part out of there within three years. Tony Blair is up for reelection soon (no later than June 2006) and he will be going bye bye unless he gets the UK troops out and that will likely mean Bush (or Kerry) will change the current tact in Iraq as well.
Similar to this I see many people think in terms of "how much we pay in taxes" to be income tax. I would be interested in what form of tax you think is ideal?
I for one prefer it all to be a tax on total worth. A small percentage. Now this includes say a corporation that has 10 billion in total worth. They should pay a percentage of their total worth to the gov't to help pitch in since as a society we have decided it is a good idea for everyone to fund schools, defense, police, fire, etc. Also debt subtracts from ones total wealth so people in over their head have a chance of getting out of it.
Do you prefer taxing on say income, total worth, sales tax (money spent), etc.?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't mention anything about evolution in my post nor did I say anything about the world being too good. The universe, what is seen and unseen as a whole, the design of that is too good. Which of course humans and everything else in it are part of the design. I was in the camp you are in now once too, that is why I say over time as one examines more of the Universe and all its components, including people, not just the basic parts studied in a vacuum, one tends toward seeing the brilliance of the design. Why? Because it is brilliant and better than anything any human has ever come up with or created.
If you simply do not believe in God then of course we have two very different models in our head of the Universe, who created it, our place in it (humans), etc. You never actually said if you believe God created the Universe or not in your post though.
You say bullshit but completely make his point.
Your degree helped you get a job. Your real learning for that job you did on your own. Oh and you think people who go to ITT are intellectually equivalent to monkey's which goes right to the root of anti-intellectualism which is someone like you thinking you are intellectually superior than someone else because your piece of paper is bigger than theirs.
Bravo!
Excellent post. In school I always kept it in my mind that learning the subject very well was my main goal. I did not cheat, partly because I had this in mind partly because I was too lazy to and partly because I didn't care if my GPA went up a tenth of a point or not. I didn't care if it went up a tenth of a point because I wanted to learn the subjects well first of all.
Every one of my friends I knew and all other people I knew in class, cheated and cheated regularly. So why would I, who am not going to cheat think I could compete againt their GPA's? I couldn't, but in the real world I knew eventually I would be going up against these weanies in the marketplace doing a real job and I would have more knowledge and do better than them despite my not stellar GPA. To this day my theory has proved correct.
I feel the important part of a life of learning is learning how to teach yourself from the resources out there. About 80% of the teachers seem to be of poor quality and seem to just teach for some extra money, are professors just to write papers, or do not want to be out in the job marketplace. I can't say I disagree with them out in the real job marketplace it sux but that is why they are there. For the rest of the teachers who are excited about what they are teaching and want people to learn about it, God bless you because I have had some great teachers that add to making society a much better place with their skill in the classroom.
Point is I think too many of us have been asked to bow before a mighty teacher that has cheated there way to a good GPA and really does not deserve any respect. Those bad seeds are also part of the problem of growing anti-intellectualism not so much the anti-intellectual Slashdot crowd.
Agreed, I believe that the longer one exists (stays alive) and the more experience they gain, especially if they try to learn about the world around them, the more they will tend toward seeing that the design is just too good to not have intelligence behind it. Not just intelligence but a supreme one greater than we can comprehend.
:-).
If you look at Einstein, Romonijin (sp?), Kaku, etc. all of them talk about God and the "why's" God created things the way He did. So for anyone who doesn't think there is an intelligence to the design of the Universe, create one yourself that is better and let me know
I agree.
We have the major climate apects we see today which are different from quite ancient history primarily due to the Himalaya mountains. Before the expansion up of the Himalaya mountains the earth was much warmer with northern Alaska being actually quite tropical. So was North America for that matter. With the Himalayas removed from computer models and the rest of the Earth elevations and oceans set to as close as we know we see the tropical environment we would expect from the fossil records on the various continents.
If you add the Himalayas, the models show North America much colder, with the gulf stream dipping down like we see today, etc. All of this was on a Discovery or PBS show a while back. I am too lazy to go find a link.
Anyway one may be inclined to think, oh warming everything up will simply offset the Himalayas and we will have nice jungles to run around in all over North America. This is of course not true because you can raise global temp's but the Himalayas are still there.
I am simply advocating better modeling to know what might happen and what actions might work to our advantage.
Is warming really a bad thing? While it sounds like what you say is correct, what if that extra moisture simply means there is more moisture in the atmosphere, meaning more rain, less deserts.
I really don't know which is good or bad and think most scientists don't either. I am surprised there isn't a bigger push for modelling all the different scenarios we think might happen given raising temp's. They might be quite good, they might be horrendous.
If we look at the models and know they are good we may actually want to try and make things even hotter. Like what if we get the whole of the african desert and middle east deserts to get more rain? Of course with technology now we cannot say something like this for sure but I am willing to entertain the idea and keep an open mind about it.
However having an administration in the white house that simply denies that warming is taking place is just stupid. Anyone who knows the concept of numbers can see that. Why don't they just say, you know what it might be better for us all to crank the heat up a bit and here our the models peer reviewed to show that?
If you are exempt it means you don't pay.
:-).
If you are getting tax relief, it means you are part of a group that should pay but for some reason you are getting relief.
Church's, Mosque's, Temples's etc. are as far from a group that has to pay taxes as you can get. They DO NOT PAY TAXES in the U.S. and never have. Therefore how could you RELIEVE them of having to pay something that they never did in the first place.
They don't need relief, they are exempt
So if you don't believe in God then it is unlikely there will be enough common ground to even have a discussion about this because someone will likely not believe in someone having a soul.
So for the atheists, I will not address.
However for the religious, like myself there are still many more questions to this issue. If you do not want usage of embryonic stem sells is it because at this point you believe these cells have a soul?
At this question I think I diverge from most of the religious because I do not believe there is a soul interfaced to this yet and would be fine to use.
So I think it boils down to one of the following
- Soul interfaced at conception
- Soul interfaced at cells multiplying
- Soul/becomes a human at N'th trimester
- Soul interfaced at birth (first breath)
- Soul interfaced when brain developed
I find it quite difficult to definitively say any one of those since we do not and probably will never know how the soul interfaces through the human body in terms acceptable to the "prove it to me scientifically" group. I would say we have enough literature from the Torah, Bible, Quran (for the monotheists) to only definitively say the last is obviously false. That once the child is born it is murder to kill it. Which I think every modern culture adheres to now.The other choices I am sure will be debated for a llllooooNNNNNGGG time to come.
I would consider myself in the group that believes the soul interfaces at birth with first breath. However that does not mean I think abortion is ok which I won't go into all the scenarios for that...
The U.S. Federal government is not providing tax relief to religious organizations, it has made them exempt from having to pay taxes.
For relief you would need a tax in the first place to relieve them of, which there has never been.
Sorry for the rant.
It is a perfectly valid rant. I am more concerned however that the priority now days seems to be helping existing companies squeeze a few extra percentage points of extra profits out of consumers. The government is actively helping them in this endeaver.
I would much rather see government put its weight behind creating new technologies and radical concepts that can in turn create entire industries. Like public space travel/space tourism, space mining, hydrogen powered economy instead of petroleam powered one, fusion reactors, innovative public transit systems, automating more of education and making it cheaper, etc.
Putting extra effort and concentrating time on making sure someone who is already making money makes just a little bit more money is not helping people who aren't making enough money to live, and that is what the role of gov't should be.
Actually the paper trail is needed. You don't let people leave with it though. You have a printout with a bar code or whatever that prints out after they vote then that gets locked up. They can see on the paper who it says they voted for. Then if there is a recount they can unluck all the paper votes and count them. Also any auditor can come back and check on the results using the paper. If the bar codes were tampered with it would be obvious because you could also see on the sheet what the person voted for and the person who voted can also look at this.
I think that is the best way to do it.
Yah I thought I might be wrong on that, but it is one of the drugs I don't think should be availble so I left it in the list.
but to sum it up, if we could come up with more popular viable other parties it would really fix all my beef's.
Green party is too pro environment and peace for me. There will never in the history of humanity be no war, so to run on that runs against humanity. Sometimes it is necessary.
Libertarian is almost spot on for me except their are some government agencies I would like to see stay. Also too pro legalizing drugs. I don't think the opiate family of drugs (hydrocodone, cocaine, oxycontin, heroine, etc) should be legal for anyone to buy, etc.
So I think we need to create a better party than what we have now. I don't like any of them. I would take that over any system reforms.
A sad, sad day indeed. I guess the lure of higher health insurance costs, lower wages, higher housing costs, higher energy costs, bigger deficits and more layoffs were just too good an offer for the repub's to stay home. I would say I am happy they are going to get what they deserve but the problem is I am going to get what they deserve now too.
Through imaging with Cassini or when Huygens is going down I think a clearly defined pic of a body of liquid would really be something special.
Even though it would not support life and such having something like that there would be amazing. I know it is predicted but I like to think of it in terms of anything we find in our backyard of the Solar System means there are billions probably trillions of things like it and even more amazing out there beyond that.
In the science briefing today a number of the scientists commented on how with the radar data there are no peaks of valleys over 50 meters. The visual is hard to tell the height but with the radar they know.
I'm not complaining about anything- my favored strategy in the war on terror would have Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, Jordan, and parts of Egypt glowing in the dark WITHIN 72 HOURS OF THE TOWERS FALLING.
3000 Americans (some not Americans) = kill over 300 million?
Yah, no idea why the rest of the world wants nukes and thinks Americans supporting Bush are stupid and supremicists, no idea at all...
I realize you are exagerating to make a point but keep things in perspective, over 30,000 children die of hunger every day, want to save some lives direct your ignorant rage there for starters.
Well with General Relativity Einstein looks at in terms of a "frame" of reference where if the body is rotating in it you observe a curvature of space and time due to this.
With Teleparallelism it looks at the effect in terms of "flat" space instead of curved space.
I look at in terms of the energy and thus matter that is in a given space distorts the very fabric of space and time thus yielding the effect we call gravity and many other observable things. I don't see anywhere in either theory an expanation why rotation is needed to explain this effect nor why it would have to be. Although in the observable universe all bodies we would encouter would be rotating in relation to at least something else, so it is the norm.
So maybe someone who is more expert at the details of the theories can right me if I am wrong that the rotation qualifier is not actually needed nor correct?
I have to disagree that the rotation of the earth is causing this effect. The same amount of mass would cause this distortion regardless of its' movement.
I think it is because of how obviously right the judge is.
I think why Cable companies get the "evil" label so much is not so much TWC but because in a lot of markets companies in the past kept buying the smaller companies for more and more money and to finance it simply kept raising rates. TWC seems to be the end of that food chain a lot of the time and from a consumer stand point, people signed up for cable not financing a monopoly crusade.
I would have to give credit to a damn good design for it to be able to roll like that, which it isn't supposed to do and yet it doesn't rip apart and actually still made the altitude.
Good stuff!
Liberals tend to value the needs of society above those of the individual, and hence, sacrifice property rights for environmental protection.
I think it has more to do with greed.
You can set aside and manage natural resources for many things including making money on them. Problem comes when a small group or an individual wants to use them and exploits them to the point of destroying them.
I have no problem with mining, logging, whatever, but to do it to the point of completely destroying it for that use so that no wildlife or people can still enjoy it and use it is just greed and stupidity in my opinion. Not just conservative and liberal. I know many conservative, pro gun, hunters that go and use excellent public lands all the time and would do about anything to ensure they are kept useable. It is just common sense.
It's a fucking war.
Only congress has the right to declare war. This is not a war, nor was it sold as one. It was sold as many things (pre-emptive strike, rid Saddam of WMD, fight the terrorists, etc.) but I think the one they say now most often is it was a liberation.
I agree that initially great care was taken to reduce civilian casualties but that too now looks like it is being thrown out the window. Bombing in residential areas is occurring more and more.
I don't see any motivation for people to stay there fighting for much longer. I predict U.S. is for the most part out of there within three years. Tony Blair is up for reelection soon (no later than June 2006) and he will be going bye bye unless he gets the UK troops out and that will likely mean Bush (or Kerry) will change the current tact in Iraq as well.
Similar to this I see many people think in terms of "how much we pay in taxes" to be income tax. I would be interested in what form of tax you think is ideal?
I for one prefer it all to be a tax on total worth. A small percentage. Now this includes say a corporation that has 10 billion in total worth. They should pay a percentage of their total worth to the gov't to help pitch in since as a society we have decided it is a good idea for everyone to fund schools, defense, police, fire, etc. Also debt subtracts from ones total wealth so people in over their head have a chance of getting out of it.
Do you prefer taxing on say income, total worth, sales tax (money spent), etc.?