It's called "Desktops" and the *nix world has had this for ages.
No, it isn't. Yes, I could keep a whole set of programs running on one desktop, and a different set on a different desktop. But that's not as useful as what I'm talking about. And, for what it's worth, I mainly develop in RHEL.
What I want is almost more like a VM snapshot. Configure a state exactly, including all the applications and their positions in windows, and be able to shut it down or recall it with a single click. It's different than a desktop because it isn't a bunch of applications that are just sitting idle out of sight, and it's something that you can bring up easily after shutting the computer down, or when you haven't worked on a project for 6 months. It's different than a VM because you only want to recall the state of the workspace, not the state of the actual files, and an entire new VM is way overpowered for what this is.
It sounds like KDE Activities are kind of like this. Some IDEs offer similar functionality in the way they manage projects or workspaces. But it really ought to be an overall paradigm for the OS itself.
I love to bash MS as much as the next guy, but this actually sounds like it could be useful. If you do any kind of real work on a computer, in terms of programming, or designing, or even writing and excel analysis tasks, you can probably appreciate how long it takes to get a setup configured to really get things done. At my job I have a couple possible coding setups, depending on which projects I'm working on. I also have a couple setups for data analysis work, again depending on the project. It takes time to pull up the right reference documents, arrange windows, configure things...
It would be a damn cool OS feature to remember all the documents and applications I have up, where they are arranged, and allow me to take a "snapshot" when it is all ready to go. Next time I need to work on the same project, refer back to the snapshot, and I can be working instantly.
To the extent that they are trying to provide that level of functionality, I'm interested. To the extent that they are trying to change the task bar to tabs just for the sake of change, this will be stupid.
As clarified above, if the person's body isn't participating directly, yes, although it would be pretty pointless/uncomfortable.
Why pointless or uncomfortable? The exoskeletons that are being envisioned are just machines that have some of the benefits of tools and some of the benefits of vehicles - think of it as an excavator with a different toolset and interface. Or thought of another way - a very strong and versatile robot chassis that uses a human for sensing, control, and inverse kinematics calculations. Both of these things are potentially very useful.
Creating a robot walking like a person and lifting anything as a person does would be quite difficult too because of the associated instability. Most of actions performed in a movie like Ironman would be extremely difficult or directly impossible, regardless of the fact of having a person inside or not.
Hard controls problem != physical impossibility. The robotic exoskeleton is not among the major physics sins of Iron Man - the unfueled reaction engines that he uses to fly everywhere, and the essentially infinite yet portable energy source are.
Additionally, making these tentacles behave as they do, like snakes with lots of mobility, would be a nightmare of complexity and provoke them to become quite weak. The way to make them a bit stronger would be via some external system, what would notably reduce their flexibility.
Again, you seem to be confusing technical challenges with limitations of physics. Of course the strength and articulation of these tentacles is beyond current engineering capability - it's sci-fi.
Just to make sure that we are on the same page: if you create whatever machine able to lift certain weight and put a person freely moving inside without any contact with the structure, it might be OK (extremely uncomfortable and pretty useless though). What I meant was the person's body also participating like what happens with a robotic arm or Spiderman's Doctor Octopus.
I think you're making a point that's obvious to anybody who gives a moment's thought to these things. Of course, putting a metal arm on someone doesn't allow that person to lift 1000lbs - their legs, spine, and rest of their body needs to support the same weight. Surprise, surprise, action movies aren't realistic.
A full exoskeleton, though, which itself provides the leg and spine structure, has no real upper limit on carrying capacity. The human is just the driver at that point and so the machine can do whatever its engineers can build it to do.
Doctor Octopus, btw, doesn't inherently violate physics - as he's portrayed, some arms are usually bracing against a structure, while other arms throw things and people around - as long as there's something besides the human body to handle the force it can make sense.
Arguing about the historical existence of the good Samaritan is essentially unknowable, you either take it on faith or don't.
Arguing about the historical existence of the good Samaritan is pointless, because that wasn't why Jesus told the parable. Having "faith" that the good Samaritan existed is missing the point.
The point of knowing the facts behind your belief grounds you in reality and gives you reasoned faith, which is far stronger and more durable than blind faith, which may get you to heaven, but which may be eroded by modern Atheists, Agnostics, mystics, etc.
The "facts" you've cited in defense of the historicity of various miracles surrounding the death and resurrection of Christ are missing the point similarly to the good Samaritan issue above. First of all, there are perfectly mundane answers to all of those observed phenomena, and generations of arguing between dogmatic Christian "literalists" and dogmatic anti-theists have failed to produce any conclusions one way or the other. It's just another iteration of an endless cycle of unproductive argument. What you are calling "reasoned faith" is just blind faith with icing - that is, a bunch of rationalization and reinterpretation to produce a veneer of empiricism around scripture. Really, it's an attempt to build a rhetorical argument with evidence so compelling that people must succumb to belief - but that's not how Christ won hearts, so why do Christians try to operate that way today? Faith cannot exist without the possibility of doubt.
Blind faith is the reason that most people today think that science supports Atheism and religion is diametrically opposed to science (except that most scientists from the last 400 years were devout Christians).
People today think that science supports atheism because Christians have publicly opposed fundamental, central theories of biology, geology, and astrophysics in their rejection of evolution and the big bang theory. Christians have done this to themselves, not because of blind faith, but because of trying forcibly assert the superiority of their worldview.
The type of argument that Strobel puts forth in A Case for Christ, and which you put forth in your earlier reply, is pretty much the weakest argument (and the least supported) of all arguments for the Christian faith. "Jesus existed, so you must become a Christian". Charles Manson existed, and we've got much more evidence (and plenty of eyewitness accounts) about Joseph Smith's miracles - so why don't we believe in their philosophies? Do you see Buddhists or anybody else doing the same thing? It's absurd. You attempt to re-frame the faith discussion into the realm of an empirical system of thought which did not exist for the first ~1600 years of the church's history. You are bringing apples and oranges to a gun fight.
Instead, follow Christ's model. A real biblical "literalist", in my mind, would be someone who has sold everything he has and given it to the poor. The way Christ and early Christians reached people was not through their unassailable rhetorical proofs, but through their subversive beliefs and practices showing poor and sick people had just as much (or even more) intrinsic worth than the monarchs and the rich merchants. The best argument for Christianity is that Christ's teachings have the power to address the most dysfunctional parts of human nature, and heal broken people. In my mind, that's what a real "rational" faith looks like - it admits that matters of faith are inherently unprovable (isn't that why a "childlike faith" is promoted in the Bible?). Simultaneously, faith can be empirical because you put the principles to the test in your own life - is forgiveness and prayer for your enemies a better way to live than holding on to bitterness? Is it better to give to the poor than to buy ourselves more gadgets? Is love truly a more worthwhile pursuit than wealth or power? In Christian terms, that's the power of personal te
I personally found "A Case For Christ" to be really weak, overall. I think that any attempt to "prove" the validity of Christianity is pretty misguided, actually, and will always be doomed to failure.
That said, I consider myself a Christian, and I'm a "practicing" one by many of the definitions you might care to use. I just find it kind of silly to expend so much effort on establishing historicity of anything in particular from scripture. It's comparable to arguing about whether there really was a good Samaritan, for instance - the point of the parable wasn't the historicity of Samaritans or a particular guy who helped someone, it was the moral meaning, which doesn't change at all if the story is fictional.
You're defending a guy who bragged about sexually assaulting women,
See, this is EXACTLY the kind of stuff that the MSM is pushing. The guy bragged about gold diggers, MSM : "Literally sexual assault! Find the victims!!!!".
Trump bragged about non-consensual sexual contact - how would you categorize that? It sounds like an admission of sexual assault to me.
What's more, there is an extensive list of women alleging assault on Trump's part - so characterizing Trump as a sex offender isn't just based on his words, but his actions.
And before you claim that this is just the "MSM" at work, answer me this question - why were there no sexual allegations against GWB? The left and the media loathed GWB - why didn't they try to take him down with these same manufactured stories?
Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one - there isn't a massive conspiracy involving multiple news networks and dozens of otherwise unconnected women - instead, there's just a rich asshole who has spent his life treating women like property and suing them into oblivion if they tried to do anything about it.
Last question: what evidence, if any, would convince you that Trump is an offender? Do you have the same standards of evidence for other politicians?
This might have made sense in the earlier days of the nation, but increasingly, the political divides that exist aren't between regions or states, but between the urban and rural areas within states. Rural Californians share political views with rural Texans more than they do with urban Californians. So the geography is unworkable for splitting the nation up - if you really tried to do it on a political basis you would end up with urban, democratic "island nations" surrounded by sparsely populated rural, republican areas.
Definitely not. Trump is, first and foremost, an authoritarian, the exact opposite of a classical liberal. Classical liberals like JS Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Paine provided the inspiration for the American experiment in democracy.
Authoritarians like Hitler, Stalin, and Trump revile free speech, education, science, and empiricism. Divine authority cannot tolerate questioning. It requires unassailable certitude and ignorant compliance from the masses. So we can expect this new wave of Trumpism to make education, especially at advanced levels, a primary target.
I honestly hope California becomes its own country then they can go bankrupt with their socialist economy without dragging the rest of the country down.
California's "socialist economy" apparently works a hell of a lot better than that of most red states, considering that they get only $0.78 from the federal government for every $1 paid. Mississippi, on the other hand, gets $2 from the feds for every dollar of federal taxation they pay. I don't think this will work out like you are hoping.
But because the human species is intensely social, we derives benefit from the knowledge and insight of those who have seen a lot.
Meh, if there was such a big benefit, we wouldn't have entire fields working on trying to avoid aging.
Your premise is flawed. Avoiding aging != wanting to be dumb and inexperienced. It means we don't want to get frail and die. By your logic, anti-aging research is about finding ways to get rid of old people.
This particular lie needs to die. The top rate was 90% ON PAPER ONLY.
So what you're saying then, is that it isn't a lie? I never claimed what the effective rate was. The marginal tax rate was 90% then, which you don't dispute, even though the effective tax rate was indeed lower. Just as now, the top tax bracket is around 40%, and the wealthy still pay a lower overall rate (the top 1% pays something like 25% effectively). The point stands, though - higher taxes are demonstrated historically to be compatible with widespread economic prosperity, AND were used to pay down a massive war debt. The people suggesting that tax cuts for the rich are going to improve our economy or overall prosperity are either blatantly malicious or profoundly stupid.
Passing the Fair Tax could do it in spades, the economy would sprout rocket engines under the Fair Tax as manufacturing would be done in an income--tax-free environment in the only developed country on the planet where that could be done. Foreign business people would injure themselves in the stampede to build factories here in the USA. We would probably actually experience a fairly severe labor shortage, which would spiral wages further. We could probably actually allow more immigrants because we could put them to work and the country would prosper.
This is a really amazing fantasy - sounds like the Fair Tax could cure cancer too, right? Here's my question: what evidence do you have that cutting taxes has ever had anything near that impact on any economy? During the 1950's, we had a top marginal tax rate of about 90%, and that's one of the most prosperous times in American history. We actually paid down the massive war debt thanks to those high tax rates, and also witnessed a widely distributed increase in wealth across our society.
On the flip side, the Reagan tax cuts are about the closest thing we can compare to in the U.S. for the kind of cuts you advocate, and they didn't turn the nation into your libertarian utopia - they DID, however, manage to send our national debt skyrocketing again after several decades of decline.
Either provide evidence to back up your economic fantasies, or stop making such ludicrous claims.
Words have meaning. You're lying in precisely the same way the RIAA/MPAA does to try to support their campaign of bankrupting grandmothers. An income tax is an income tax. Stop playing word games to suggest that your desire to take less money from the wealthy and more money from the poor is somehow morally defensible.
Nope, but I don't see anybody except climate change skeptics having a problem with consensus.
My point is just this: it's true that decision by consensus isn't science, although it's important to acknowledge that the creation of models good enough to gain consensus is to some extent the entire goal of science. If people couldn't have generally agreed on Newton, then they never would have progressed to Maxwell or Einstein. However, science is built to make achieving that goal as hard as possible. You kick the crap out of an idea, try everything you can think of to prove it wrong, and have all the world's top experts in the field criticize it mercilessly. If, after all that, it is accepted by a majority of those experts, then it is hopefully pretty decent.
Skepticism is now discouraged in education. Consensus is the new thing.
I know a lot of climate change skeptics like to criticize consensus, but consensus isn't antithetical to skepticism, and is actually born out of thorough skepticism. It also has its place in science. In fact, I'd say the "group approach" is very compatible with scientific thinking. Specifically, we have to acknowledge that science can't happen in a vacuum - look at the decline of science in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union for your evidence - the limitations imposed on collaboration with the international communities and the end of free speech really dampened the ability of either nation's scientists to make real progress. If you want to make sure that none of your ideas are based on fact, just throw scientists in jail or work camps any time their theories contradict your ideology.
To work properly, scientists have to attend conferences and talk to one another and criticize each other's ideas. Consensus sometimes emerges out of this process, which is a good thing - we shouldn't still have people debating the virtue of the Copernican vs. the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. That said, in a classically liberal, pro-science society, people are still welcome to express disagreement, although unless your argument is highly novel it has probably already been considered and rejected many times over by the professionals, and it will be received accordingly.
Oh... I'm sorry you have to deal with that kind of struggle. I'm sure it isn't easy coping with that kind of thing and I appreciate you being candid about it, obviously that changes the discussion.
I do have to ask - if you had a suicidal friend, wouldn't you still want to help them reconsider, or at least wait it out a bit? I do agree that we should generally give people the ability to govern their lives as they see fit, and I think in cases like that of Terry Pratchett, he should have had the right to end his life on his terms before the dementia really took hold. However, the problem as I see it is that suicidal ideation seems to be temporary in the vast majority of cases - suicidal feelings don't last forever, but a decision made in a bad moment can.
Going back to the start of the topic, it seems that you are trying to make the claim that mathematics is not "falsifiable", and the Tao is not "falsifiable", therefore the Tao is somehow similar, or our means of evaluating it would be similar to the way we evaluate mathematics. Is this what you are suggesting?
Sweet jesus... that's the last time I ever try posting from the mobile site. Intended formatting below:
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. We've already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and it's called science. It doesn't work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by "evidence or STFU". Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. It's a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach "truth" by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. Weâ(TM)ve already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and itâ(TM)s called science. It doesnâ(TM)t work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by âoeevidence or STFUâ. Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. Itâ(TM)s a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach âoetruthâ by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
I was in charge of cleaning up a student database when I worked in IT for a school district years ago. While I was manually deduplicating, I found a couple entries with matching first names, last names, and birth dates. Middle names and a few other minor details were different. I was 99% sure this was a data entry error, but called the school's office to figure out which information was correct, and it turns out that these were twins. The parents had decided to give them the same first names, but different middle names.
Voting is serious. Trust in the integrity of the vote is absolutely critical to the survival of the democracy. We shouldn't allow automated systems to purge records any more than we should allow automated systems to create records.
I know you're just trying to be provocative here, but a majority of people that survive a serious suicide attempt will recover and go on to live better lives. Maybe you're advocating for personal freedom or something - but in most cases, a suicide attempt is best understood as a symptom of profound mental illness, so it is a good thing to treat that illness and save a life to the same extent that it is a good thing to cure a person's cancer.
I'll admit that my WWII history chops aren't great, so I don't really have any specific claims about a game changing technology that could have had a decisive impact on France's role in WWII, but it is the case that a handful of scientists changed the course of the war for other countries. (Turing, Manhattan project, Britain's radar advantage). Overall, my contention is this: murdering your own scientists and fostering anti-intellectualism has a real and lasting impact on a nation's economy and military, among other things.
Mathematics is a language to describe what we've observed of the universe.
I disagree there. There are lots of mathematical concepts that have no physical analogues, or that precede their application to physical models by decades or centuries. Mathematics is a symbolic language to express logical relationships. It got a start in trying to describe the physical world, but pieces got abstracted away into a non-physical realm of thought pretty early on.
Physics isn't based on mathematical principles
Yes and no. Physics could not exist without mathematics. At its most fundamental level, it is the practice of observing the world and asking "what math describes this behavior?" Although Galileo and and others made initial forays into the area, physics as a cohesive discipline didn't really exist until Newton, who conclusively showed that mathematics could be used better than any other system to express relationships between physical quantities. He was the first to produce a unifying theoretical framework with widely applicable explanatory power, and that development in physical modeling was dependent on and critical to his invention of the calculus. So, by a simple reading in English, physics is "based on mathematical principles". If you are trying to use a strict, formal definition, then you might be correct, but you need to provide those definitions up front, otherwise you are just fiddling with semantics rather than making an actual point.
That said, the methods of accumulating discrete units of progress are generally different in math and physics. I'm not sure if that's what you are getting at.
To clarify things, share your definition of "falsify". There's no way that humans could have developed basic arithmetic without manipulating physical objects and deriving the relationships and addition/subtraction operations empirically, which would have counted as falsification. And a useful model cannot be built on a symbolic language unless it is at least equally useful. What's more, the classic distinction between formal proof in mathematics and prediction/failure to falsify in physics is shrinking in recent years - look at the 3 color map "proof", which recently used exhaustive computation to test as many maps as possible. A single existence of a map that could NOT be handled by 3 colors would have "falsified" the claim just as conclusively as any physics model has ever been falsified.
That might not fit your definition of "falsify", but it would absolutely fit the definition as understood by an average English speaker. Which makes me suspect you're playing word games, although maybe I misunderstand the point you're trying to make.
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It's called "Desktops" and the *nix world has had this for ages.
No, it isn't. Yes, I could keep a whole set of programs running on one desktop, and a different set on a different desktop. But that's not as useful as what I'm talking about. And, for what it's worth, I mainly develop in RHEL.
What I want is almost more like a VM snapshot. Configure a state exactly, including all the applications and their positions in windows, and be able to shut it down or recall it with a single click. It's different than a desktop because it isn't a bunch of applications that are just sitting idle out of sight, and it's something that you can bring up easily after shutting the computer down, or when you haven't worked on a project for 6 months. It's different than a VM because you only want to recall the state of the workspace, not the state of the actual files, and an entire new VM is way overpowered for what this is.
It sounds like KDE Activities are kind of like this. Some IDEs offer similar functionality in the way they manage projects or workspaces. But it really ought to be an overall paradigm for the OS itself.
The burden's on the doomsayers, not on the people dismissing them.
What evidence would you accept as sufficient? Waiting until it's happened is too late.
I love to bash MS as much as the next guy, but this actually sounds like it could be useful. If you do any kind of real work on a computer, in terms of programming, or designing, or even writing and excel analysis tasks, you can probably appreciate how long it takes to get a setup configured to really get things done. At my job I have a couple possible coding setups, depending on which projects I'm working on. I also have a couple setups for data analysis work, again depending on the project. It takes time to pull up the right reference documents, arrange windows, configure things...
It would be a damn cool OS feature to remember all the documents and applications I have up, where they are arranged, and allow me to take a "snapshot" when it is all ready to go. Next time I need to work on the same project, refer back to the snapshot, and I can be working instantly.
To the extent that they are trying to provide that level of functionality, I'm interested. To the extent that they are trying to change the task bar to tabs just for the sake of change, this will be stupid.
As clarified above, if the person's body isn't participating directly, yes, although it would be pretty pointless/uncomfortable.
Why pointless or uncomfortable? The exoskeletons that are being envisioned are just machines that have some of the benefits of tools and some of the benefits of vehicles - think of it as an excavator with a different toolset and interface. Or thought of another way - a very strong and versatile robot chassis that uses a human for sensing, control, and inverse kinematics calculations. Both of these things are potentially very useful.
Creating a robot walking like a person and lifting anything as a person does would be quite difficult too because of the associated instability. Most of actions performed in a movie like Ironman would be extremely difficult or directly impossible, regardless of the fact of having a person inside or not.
Hard controls problem != physical impossibility. The robotic exoskeleton is not among the major physics sins of Iron Man - the unfueled reaction engines that he uses to fly everywhere, and the essentially infinite yet portable energy source are.
Additionally, making these tentacles behave as they do, like snakes with lots of mobility, would be a nightmare of complexity and provoke them to become quite weak. The way to make them a bit stronger would be via some external system, what would notably reduce their flexibility.
Again, you seem to be confusing technical challenges with limitations of physics. Of course the strength and articulation of these tentacles is beyond current engineering capability - it's sci-fi.
Just to make sure that we are on the same page: if you create whatever machine able to lift certain weight and put a person freely moving inside without any contact with the structure, it might be OK (extremely uncomfortable and pretty useless though). What I meant was the person's body also participating like what happens with a robotic arm or Spiderman's Doctor Octopus.
I think you're making a point that's obvious to anybody who gives a moment's thought to these things. Of course, putting a metal arm on someone doesn't allow that person to lift 1000lbs - their legs, spine, and rest of their body needs to support the same weight. Surprise, surprise, action movies aren't realistic.
A full exoskeleton, though, which itself provides the leg and spine structure, has no real upper limit on carrying capacity. The human is just the driver at that point and so the machine can do whatever its engineers can build it to do.
Doctor Octopus, btw, doesn't inherently violate physics - as he's portrayed, some arms are usually bracing against a structure, while other arms throw things and people around - as long as there's something besides the human body to handle the force it can make sense.
Arguing about the historical existence of the good Samaritan is essentially unknowable, you either take it on faith or don't.
Arguing about the historical existence of the good Samaritan is pointless, because that wasn't why Jesus told the parable. Having "faith" that the good Samaritan existed is missing the point.
The point of knowing the facts behind your belief grounds you in reality and gives you reasoned faith, which is far stronger and more durable than blind faith, which may get you to heaven, but which may be eroded by modern Atheists, Agnostics, mystics, etc.
The "facts" you've cited in defense of the historicity of various miracles surrounding the death and resurrection of Christ are missing the point similarly to the good Samaritan issue above. First of all, there are perfectly mundane answers to all of those observed phenomena, and generations of arguing between dogmatic Christian "literalists" and dogmatic anti-theists have failed to produce any conclusions one way or the other. It's just another iteration of an endless cycle of unproductive argument. What you are calling "reasoned faith" is just blind faith with icing - that is, a bunch of rationalization and reinterpretation to produce a veneer of empiricism around scripture. Really, it's an attempt to build a rhetorical argument with evidence so compelling that people must succumb to belief - but that's not how Christ won hearts, so why do Christians try to operate that way today? Faith cannot exist without the possibility of doubt.
Blind faith is the reason that most people today think that science supports Atheism and religion is diametrically opposed to science (except that most scientists from the last 400 years were devout Christians).
People today think that science supports atheism because Christians have publicly opposed fundamental, central theories of biology, geology, and astrophysics in their rejection of evolution and the big bang theory. Christians have done this to themselves, not because of blind faith, but because of trying forcibly assert the superiority of their worldview.
The type of argument that Strobel puts forth in A Case for Christ, and which you put forth in your earlier reply, is pretty much the weakest argument (and the least supported) of all arguments for the Christian faith. "Jesus existed, so you must become a Christian". Charles Manson existed, and we've got much more evidence (and plenty of eyewitness accounts) about Joseph Smith's miracles - so why don't we believe in their philosophies? Do you see Buddhists or anybody else doing the same thing? It's absurd. You attempt to re-frame the faith discussion into the realm of an empirical system of thought which did not exist for the first ~1600 years of the church's history. You are bringing apples and oranges to a gun fight.
Instead, follow Christ's model. A real biblical "literalist", in my mind, would be someone who has sold everything he has and given it to the poor. The way Christ and early Christians reached people was not through their unassailable rhetorical proofs, but through their subversive beliefs and practices showing poor and sick people had just as much (or even more) intrinsic worth than the monarchs and the rich merchants. The best argument for Christianity is that Christ's teachings have the power to address the most dysfunctional parts of human nature, and heal broken people. In my mind, that's what a real "rational" faith looks like - it admits that matters of faith are inherently unprovable (isn't that why a "childlike faith" is promoted in the Bible?). Simultaneously, faith can be empirical because you put the principles to the test in your own life - is forgiveness and prayer for your enemies a better way to live than holding on to bitterness? Is it better to give to the poor than to buy ourselves more gadgets? Is love truly a more worthwhile pursuit than wealth or power? In Christian terms, that's the power of personal te
If you are a true skeptic, a true seeker of truth, you need to read "Case for Christ" https://www.amazon.com/Case-Ch...
I personally found "A Case For Christ" to be really weak, overall. I think that any attempt to "prove" the validity of Christianity is pretty misguided, actually, and will always be doomed to failure.
That said, I consider myself a Christian, and I'm a "practicing" one by many of the definitions you might care to use. I just find it kind of silly to expend so much effort on establishing historicity of anything in particular from scripture. It's comparable to arguing about whether there really was a good Samaritan, for instance - the point of the parable wasn't the historicity of Samaritans or a particular guy who helped someone, it was the moral meaning, which doesn't change at all if the story is fictional.
You're defending a guy who bragged about sexually assaulting women,
See, this is EXACTLY the kind of stuff that the MSM is pushing. The guy bragged about gold diggers, MSM : "Literally sexual assault! Find the victims!!!!".
Trump bragged about non-consensual sexual contact - how would you categorize that? It sounds like an admission of sexual assault to me.
What's more, there is an extensive list of women alleging assault on Trump's part - so characterizing Trump as a sex offender isn't just based on his words, but his actions.
And before you claim that this is just the "MSM" at work, answer me this question - why were there no sexual allegations against GWB? The left and the media loathed GWB - why didn't they try to take him down with these same manufactured stories?
Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one - there isn't a massive conspiracy involving multiple news networks and dozens of otherwise unconnected women - instead, there's just a rich asshole who has spent his life treating women like property and suing them into oblivion if they tried to do anything about it.
Last question: what evidence, if any, would convince you that Trump is an offender? Do you have the same standards of evidence for other politicians?
This might have made sense in the earlier days of the nation, but increasingly, the political divides that exist aren't between regions or states, but between the urban and rural areas within states. Rural Californians share political views with rural Texans more than they do with urban Californians. So the geography is unworkable for splitting the nation up - if you really tried to do it on a political basis you would end up with urban, democratic "island nations" surrounded by sparsely populated rural, republican areas.
Definitely not. Trump is, first and foremost, an authoritarian, the exact opposite of a classical liberal. Classical liberals like JS Mill, John Locke, and Thomas Paine provided the inspiration for the American experiment in democracy.
Authoritarians like Hitler, Stalin, and Trump revile free speech, education, science, and empiricism. Divine authority cannot tolerate questioning. It requires unassailable certitude and ignorant compliance from the masses. So we can expect this new wave of Trumpism to make education, especially at advanced levels, a primary target.
I honestly hope California becomes its own country then they can go bankrupt with their socialist economy without dragging the rest of the country down.
California's "socialist economy" apparently works a hell of a lot better than that of most red states, considering that they get only $0.78 from the federal government for every $1 paid. Mississippi, on the other hand, gets $2 from the feds for every dollar of federal taxation they pay. I don't think this will work out like you are hoping.
Citation: https://taxfoundation.org/pres...
But because the human species is intensely social, we derives benefit from the knowledge and insight of those who have seen a lot.
Meh, if there was such a big benefit, we wouldn't have entire fields working on trying to avoid aging.
Your premise is flawed. Avoiding aging != wanting to be dumb and inexperienced. It means we don't want to get frail and die. By your logic, anti-aging research is about finding ways to get rid of old people.
This particular lie needs to die. The top rate was 90% ON PAPER ONLY.
So what you're saying then, is that it isn't a lie? I never claimed what the effective rate was. The marginal tax rate was 90% then, which you don't dispute, even though the effective tax rate was indeed lower. Just as now, the top tax bracket is around 40%, and the wealthy still pay a lower overall rate (the top 1% pays something like 25% effectively). The point stands, though - higher taxes are demonstrated historically to be compatible with widespread economic prosperity, AND were used to pay down a massive war debt. The people suggesting that tax cuts for the rich are going to improve our economy or overall prosperity are either blatantly malicious or profoundly stupid.
Passing the Fair Tax could do it in spades, the economy would sprout rocket engines under the Fair Tax as manufacturing would be done in an income--tax-free environment in the only developed country on the planet where that could be done. Foreign business people would injure themselves in the stampede to build factories here in the USA. We would probably actually experience a fairly severe labor shortage, which would spiral wages further. We could probably actually allow more immigrants because we could put them to work and the country would prosper.
This is a really amazing fantasy - sounds like the Fair Tax could cure cancer too, right? Here's my question: what evidence do you have that cutting taxes has ever had anything near that impact on any economy? During the 1950's, we had a top marginal tax rate of about 90%, and that's one of the most prosperous times in American history. We actually paid down the massive war debt thanks to those high tax rates, and also witnessed a widely distributed increase in wealth across our society.
On the flip side, the Reagan tax cuts are about the closest thing we can compare to in the U.S. for the kind of cuts you advocate, and they didn't turn the nation into your libertarian utopia - they DID, however, manage to send our national debt skyrocketing again after several decades of decline.
Either provide evidence to back up your economic fantasies, or stop making such ludicrous claims.
Income taxes in any form are stealing
Just like downloading music is stealing, right?
Words have meaning. You're lying in precisely the same way the RIAA/MPAA does to try to support their campaign of bankrupting grandmothers. An income tax is an income tax. Stop playing word games to suggest that your desire to take less money from the wealthy and more money from the poor is somehow morally defensible.
I didn't sat anything about climate change
Nope, but I don't see anybody except climate change skeptics having a problem with consensus.
My point is just this: it's true that decision by consensus isn't science, although it's important to acknowledge that the creation of models good enough to gain consensus is to some extent the entire goal of science. If people couldn't have generally agreed on Newton, then they never would have progressed to Maxwell or Einstein. However, science is built to make achieving that goal as hard as possible. You kick the crap out of an idea, try everything you can think of to prove it wrong, and have all the world's top experts in the field criticize it mercilessly. If, after all that, it is accepted by a majority of those experts, then it is hopefully pretty decent.
Skepticism is now discouraged in education. Consensus is the new thing.
I know a lot of climate change skeptics like to criticize consensus, but consensus isn't antithetical to skepticism, and is actually born out of thorough skepticism. It also has its place in science. In fact, I'd say the "group approach" is very compatible with scientific thinking. Specifically, we have to acknowledge that science can't happen in a vacuum - look at the decline of science in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union for your evidence - the limitations imposed on collaboration with the international communities and the end of free speech really dampened the ability of either nation's scientists to make real progress. If you want to make sure that none of your ideas are based on fact, just throw scientists in jail or work camps any time their theories contradict your ideology.
To work properly, scientists have to attend conferences and talk to one another and criticize each other's ideas. Consensus sometimes emerges out of this process, which is a good thing - we shouldn't still have people debating the virtue of the Copernican vs. the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. That said, in a classically liberal, pro-science society, people are still welcome to express disagreement, although unless your argument is highly novel it has probably already been considered and rejected many times over by the professionals, and it will be received accordingly.
Oh... I'm sorry you have to deal with that kind of struggle. I'm sure it isn't easy coping with that kind of thing and I appreciate you being candid about it, obviously that changes the discussion.
I do have to ask - if you had a suicidal friend, wouldn't you still want to help them reconsider, or at least wait it out a bit? I do agree that we should generally give people the ability to govern their lives as they see fit, and I think in cases like that of Terry Pratchett, he should have had the right to end his life on his terms before the dementia really took hold. However, the problem as I see it is that suicidal ideation seems to be temporary in the vast majority of cases - suicidal feelings don't last forever, but a decision made in a bad moment can.
Going back to the start of the topic, it seems that you are trying to make the claim that mathematics is not "falsifiable", and the Tao is not "falsifiable", therefore the Tao is somehow similar, or our means of evaluating it would be similar to the way we evaluate mathematics. Is this what you are suggesting?
Sweet jesus... that's the last time I ever try posting from the mobile site. Intended formatting below:
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. We've already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and it's called science. It doesn't work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by "evidence or STFU". Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. It's a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach "truth" by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
Wales is asking for it if he believes he can create some source of ultimate objective truth. Weâ(TM)ve already got a very elaborate system established for this purpose, and itâ(TM)s called science. It doesnâ(TM)t work via lofty ideals of objectivity, though - it works by âoeevidence or STFUâ. Skepticism, argument, and some adversarial critique are key to culling out the B.S. and locating whatever humble truth remains. Itâ(TM)s a system for distilling usable meaning out of a sloppy input of amalgamated subjective human experience.
So to the extent that Wales tries to reach âoetruthâ by following the same principles of empiricism, skepticism, and open discourse, he might do something useful. More likely, though, this will be yet another news aggregator, but this time run by unaware idealists.
I was in charge of cleaning up a student database when I worked in IT for a school district years ago. While I was manually deduplicating, I found a couple entries with matching first names, last names, and birth dates. Middle names and a few other minor details were different. I was 99% sure this was a data entry error, but called the school's office to figure out which information was correct, and it turns out that these were twins. The parents had decided to give them the same first names, but different middle names.
Voting is serious. Trust in the integrity of the vote is absolutely critical to the survival of the democracy. We shouldn't allow automated systems to purge records any more than we should allow automated systems to create records.
I hope this algorithm will help prevent suicides.
Why?
I know you're just trying to be provocative here, but a majority of people that survive a serious suicide attempt will recover and go on to live better lives. Maybe you're advocating for personal freedom or something - but in most cases, a suicide attempt is best understood as a symptom of profound mental illness, so it is a good thing to treat that illness and save a life to the same extent that it is a good thing to cure a person's cancer.
I'll admit that my WWII history chops aren't great, so I don't really have any specific claims about a game changing technology that could have had a decisive impact on France's role in WWII, but it is the case that a handful of scientists changed the course of the war for other countries. (Turing, Manhattan project, Britain's radar advantage). Overall, my contention is this: murdering your own scientists and fostering anti-intellectualism has a real and lasting impact on a nation's economy and military, among other things.
Mathematics is a language to describe what we've observed of the universe.
I disagree there. There are lots of mathematical concepts that have no physical analogues, or that precede their application to physical models by decades or centuries. Mathematics is a symbolic language to express logical relationships. It got a start in trying to describe the physical world, but pieces got abstracted away into a non-physical realm of thought pretty early on.
Physics isn't based on mathematical principles
Yes and no. Physics could not exist without mathematics. At its most fundamental level, it is the practice of observing the world and asking "what math describes this behavior?" Although Galileo and and others made initial forays into the area, physics as a cohesive discipline didn't really exist until Newton, who conclusively showed that mathematics could be used better than any other system to express relationships between physical quantities. He was the first to produce a unifying theoretical framework with widely applicable explanatory power, and that development in physical modeling was dependent on and critical to his invention of the calculus. So, by a simple reading in English, physics is "based on mathematical principles". If you are trying to use a strict, formal definition, then you might be correct, but you need to provide those definitions up front, otherwise you are just fiddling with semantics rather than making an actual point.
That said, the methods of accumulating discrete units of progress are generally different in math and physics. I'm not sure if that's what you are getting at.
To clarify things, share your definition of "falsify". There's no way that humans could have developed basic arithmetic without manipulating physical objects and deriving the relationships and addition/subtraction operations empirically, which would have counted as falsification. And a useful model cannot be built on a symbolic language unless it is at least equally useful. What's more, the classic distinction between formal proof in mathematics and prediction/failure to falsify in physics is shrinking in recent years - look at the 3 color map "proof", which recently used exhaustive computation to test as many maps as possible. A single existence of a map that could NOT be handled by 3 colors would have "falsified" the claim just as conclusively as any physics model has ever been falsified.
That might not fit your definition of "falsify", but it would absolutely fit the definition as understood by an average English speaker. Which makes me suspect you're playing word games, although maybe I misunderstand the point you're trying to make.