In Europe you're allowed to make and sell things that contain non-pasturized dairy products. In the US, you're not.
I think that you have to differentiate between "make" and "sell". I routinely buy cheese in Mexico and bring it accross the border legally. I can even sell it legally. The border officials I've dealt with have never given a hoot about the cheese that I bring across. One even commented was that the cheese I was bringing in was his favorite. I've done some research on the subject, and importing dairy products is surprisingly easy and has surprisingly few restrictions (a permit and a quota), and I don't believe that pasteurization is a requirement for imported products.
Having said that, I am would not be surprised that making cheese here in the US may be subject to totally different rules.
There are some stores that specialize in selling imported European cheeses. If you miss European cheese that much you may want to research and give one a call.
When you loan an amount on INTEREST, you always make a profit. The more money you have the more profit you can make. The rich get richer - faster.
No, you are missing the point of interest. When you loan an amount with interest, you are accounting for the future value of money since money tends to depreciate due to inflation. It's simple microeconomics: $1,000 20 years ago is not the same as $1,000 today. $1,000 20 years ago is equivalent to roughly $1,500 today, assuming a very conservative 2% yearly inflation compounded yearly. That doesn't take into account the amount of money that the lender can make with that $1,000 if he invested it in a business for 20 years instead of lending it.
So in any type of free market society, loans would be fiancial suicide if interest could not be charged. As the incentive to loan, the interest rate is designed to yield a small profit. Banks make money because in essence they create money (due to the money supply multiplying factor), so they can make a small profit on loans because they expand and contract the money supply and thus keep both runaway inflation and runaway recession under some level of control. You'd be surprised how thin the profit margins of banks actually are. If you are a bank, it's extremely easy to go into bankrupcy if you aren't paying very close attention. The risks they take and the services they provide is in essence how and why they get paid.
I suggest that you read a little bit about Keynesian macroeconomics and how modern free markets couldn't exist without banks because of the effect that banks have on the money supply due to interest loans. A measured amout of what you call "greed", my friend, has in a sense made possible the computer and the Internet that you are using to read this, and has brought a higher standard of living to the world than almost any other force, including religion, and I say that while being deeply religious myself.
Nice post, but besides your obvious informal logical fallacy about a totalitarial regime(a.k.a. "slippery slope", I suggest that you enroll in a logic course), the rest of your post was just undiferentiated rhetorical goo. Please try to be coherent next time.
Wow, talk about a closed mind. Only in slashdot can a point about the foundation of the US can be turned into "mindless religion just turned people to sheep" bigotry.
While there is no question that money and the promise of riches were also motivations, saying that some of the reasons behind the first waves of immigration had nothing to do with practicing a religion freely ignores the historical record.
I don't deny that the push for religious freedom resulted, ironically, in cases of religious intolerance during colonial times. But religion through the US's history has been a deep motivation for immigration. But even if you wish to keep living in your bubble of revisionism, I challenge you to deny that religion didn't play a part during the foundation and growth of the US, and doesn't play a part today.
And that's why the democratic party lost the election: They didn't get it either.
You see, a huge portion of the US's population is religous and thus conservative when it comes to morality. That's the way it's always been, period. (Remember how the first immigrants to the colonies were looking for religious freedom?). There are even theories that argue that one of the reasons why the US became such an overwhelming economic powerhouse is precisely because of religion. The theory is called the Protestan Ethic. You can google a bit about it if you're interested. The rough gist of it is that if you have a population that has a tendency to be religous and value hard, honest work, economic prosperity is bound to follow (sort of a socioeconomic version of good karma).
The United States is not nor will ever be Europe. The mindset of large urban centers such as New York, LA and San Francisco is not the mindset of the rest of the country by a long shot. Failing to recognize these simple facts about the US means lost elections, and confused foreigners.
AFAIK, the repubilcan party is much younger than the democratic party (the republicans became a major party by stepping into the vaccuum left when the whig party collapsed).
So, the democrats have had dibs on color for a long time.
Now that's an interesting proposal: Falsifiability as a litmus test for "off-base" arguments on either end. A faith-based argument than has falsifiability would likely be dealing in an area where science may be better applicable. A scientific-based argument that lacks falsifiability would likely be dealing in an area where faith may be better applicable.
I have to agree with you on those points. Still, the debate between creationism/evolution doesn't always seem to follow them.
Again, no. This point has been made before but it's inacurate. The debate is not just one side trying to convince the other. Is about multiple sides trying to convince each other. Or do you mean to tell me that you haven't heard about anti-religion arguments trying to use science as a club to attempt to bludgeon ALL organized religion with?
In other words, the debate is, as you've pointed out, about people that think the world was created in a way inconsistent with the scientific evidence. However, it is also about people that argue that the scientific evidence is inconsistent with faith. This is an important distinction that needs to be made.
the real point of the debate is to make these people understand that, yes, it is possible that they are right, but science is falsifiable - creationism is not.
I know that your user id is in the 600k range, but you must not read slashdot much if you think that's the crux of the debate. How many anti-religious rants have been posted so far about God and religion being fairy tales, about believers being dellusional, etc? The whole point of this story is about how science provides evidence that creationism is wrong.
Your point about falsifiability (is that a word?) is a bit of a problem for me to agree on. Science is falsifiable, but misplaced faith can also be false (worshiping false Gods, etc). Of course that strict creationism is falsifiable! But you seem to be lumping strict creationism with othe forms that aren't, as you've described, falsifiable.
In fact, creationism takes many forms, from the scientist that believes that God created evolution, to the strict creationsis that believes the world was literally created in 7 days. All the while, "anti-creationism" works the same way (from the scientist that belives that evolution disproves God, to the scientist that believes evolution merely demonstrates that the book of Genesis involves parable instead of being entirely literal).
But yet many take perfectly rational positions and lump them together with irrational ones in an attempt to discredit the other side (such as strict creationists lumped together with other believers, or religious but rational scientists being lumped together with scientist that belive that science is a religion).
My point is that at the end of the day, we seem to be comparing apples and Oranges, blending them all together, and endlessly arguing about whether we have lemonade or apple cider!
I agree that faith is much more than that, but sometimes generalizations are needed to make a point (a "seeing the forest for the trees" sort of approach). Would the term "religion rests to a large extent on externally unprovable beliefs" work better?
My goal is not to argue against faith, and in fact I am deeply religious. My goal is to point out that God gave us both a brain, and faith. Using both appropiately needn't involve contradiction. If one seems to contradict the other then maybe we need to reexamine our assumptions.
There are many scientists who believe in God and who believe in evolution. The vast majority of such scientists are going to believe that God arranged to create a universe in which evolution takes place.
That's a variation of the same theme: That God created a mechanism that ultimately resulted on humans. Whether humas are the ultimate result or not, is again, virtually entirely an item of faith.
There are very few scientists, however, who believe in creationism, which says that the universe was created 5,000 years ago.
That's an interesting point, and reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the part about an alien race creating the earth complete with fake dinosaur bones, but I digress. I think that the stance of strict creationism can be as pretentious as the stance denying the existance of a creator via science: A strict creationist pretends to know how the technicalities of how God did things.
But again, I would answer that isn't the point of scripture at all. There is no "mix three portions of faith and one grain of sand to cure the blind" type of technicalities in the Bible. Because the point of science and religion answer two different questions about our existance: One seeks knowledge and facts, the other, meaning and wisdom.
And that's exactly why the whole creationism/evolution debate is pointless: You can never prove or disprove that one didn't precede the other. An argument can easily be made that God created all of it's creatures through evolution. To wit, that God created evolution.
It's kind of like science proving that God is not real. The effort is meant to fail because science cannot deal with God because it isn't designed to. On the other side, religion cannot, for the most part, deal with science because religion rests on a premise of faith which is by definition, unprovable belief.
When both sides are not even supposed to have common ground on which to argue, the creationist/evolutionist debate is a non-sequitur on both sides.
Wow, getting personal there! I question what you know based on your poor, knee-jerk responses, and you question directly who I am. Nice! That's a sure way to win an argument.
But, I'm not going to sink to the same level that you've sunk to. Since your response indicates that you don't care about discussion, only about irrationally defending your ignorant, selfish, make-believe view of the world, I'm not going to waste my time.
I will, however, leave you with a few links. If you're halfway honest with yourself you may even click on some of them.
The Myth of divorce. The 50% divorce rate is a myth, but then again I doubt you know the difference between myth and fact.
I'd say there is more of a difference between individuals of the same sex (good dad... bad dad) than there is among the average individuals between sexes (average dad approx equal average mom).
And here you reinforce my suspicion that you have no clue about how to raise children, and I'll go on a limb and say that you're probably not even in a committed relationship, to boot. At night, a mother will wake at the slightest cry from a newborn. Fathers usually sleep the night through. Between mothers and fathers, and between men and women for that matter, there are deep, proven and well-understood differences which are psychological, emotional, and intellectual. Millions of years of evolution have seen to that. I suggest that you do a little research.
Two stable gay guys can raise a child better than a "normal" man/woman couple where one or both is/are alcoholic, abusive, etc.
So what does that prove? That alcoholics or psychogically damaged people make bad parents, nothing more. To continue with your logic, an abusing, alcoholic father can raise a child better than a rabid pack of wolves. It's all a non-sequitur when it comes to the discussion, though.
Try to see the forest despite of all of those trees that you keep describing. You seem to talk about exceptions and aberrations of normal parenting, about the extremes of that continuum which you mention. However, you completely ignore the center, where most families actually are, where the government is interested in because it provides for the most efficient institution for securing a healthy next generation.
So, it comes down to evaluating each situation based upon all of the factors in that situation. Never a "...heterosexual unions combine the best of both worlds and despite their flaws, they are the ideal for that task".
That is the most assinine, useless approach I've ever heard, because it's impossible to thoroughly evaluate each situation of anything, and because trying to do so leads nowhere. Have you ever heard the term "paralysis by analysis?" That is exactly what you're describing. Your position is analogous to arguing against voting or sales tax because after all, each situation is different since each person earns differtly and can pax sales tax differently. How can you give the same value to the vote of the guy that didn't research as to the vote of the guy that spent months researching every candidate?
No, it's not supposed to cause third degree burns at all. Not unless it had been superheated by custom-made equipment. The lawsuit wasn't blaming McDonnalds for spilled coffee, it was making McDonnalds responsible for it's dangerously and unecessarily high temperature.
Another thing, the lady didn't want millions of dollars. She just wanted some help with her medical bills as a result of the injury. When McDonnalds in essence told her to f*ck off, she took them to court to recoup some medical costs. The punitive damages were decided on by the jury, and later they were reduced on appeal.
The crux of the case rests in the fact that McDonnalds had other serious burn incidents which they ignored. McDonnald's coffee-making equipment is custom-made because normal industrial coffee machines just can't get the coffee that hot. McDonnald's negligence was that they had been made aware several times that their coffee was unsafe and far hotter than the norm, yet the did nothing but stonewall and ignore legitimate complaints until the court slapped them with the veredict.
And who said that those problems aren't real? It is disingeneous to suggest that all you need is love and support. You need the proper role models, the proper amount of nurturing, and the proper relationship. Are you suggesting that there are no differences between men and women when it comes to nurturing and raising children? Is a male role-model exactly the same as a female role-model? Judging by your response I can guess that most likely you have no children since you show no clue as to what it takes to raise them.
I am not arguing that same-sex couples aren't capable of raising children and given the choice between a child in an orphanage and one adopted by a same sex couple, the second choice is clearly better. However, what I am arguing is that whenever possible heterosexual unions combine the best of both worlds and despite their flaws, they are the ideal for that task.
And so because there are problems with it (divorce, death, etc) we shouldn't have an ideal societal unit that could best raise the next generation? Wow, that's some logic there!
What argument have I attributed to you that you haven't made? I honestly want to know so I can correct my own assumptions.
On a related note, the conversation has drifted to that of preemptive presidential goals since you brought it up, right? I don't mind letting the conversation flow in the direction that you've pointed it in.
Unlike, for instance, our current president, who had the original goal of invading Iraq when he was elected.
So JFK did not have from the beginning the goal to get rid of communism if at all possible? Why did he commit troops to Vietnam then?
Anyway, since when is having a plan before getting elected a problem? Isn't contingency planning expected of any halfway-decent president even before getting into the Whitehouse? In fact, wasn't that a goal of Clinton's as well shortly before leaving office?
Slashdot Mirror
I think that you have to differentiate between "make" and "sell". I routinely buy cheese in Mexico and bring it accross the border legally. I can even sell it legally. The border officials I've dealt with have never given a hoot about the cheese that I bring across. One even commented was that the cheese I was bringing in was his favorite. I've done some research on the subject, and importing dairy products is surprisingly easy and has surprisingly few restrictions (a permit and a quota), and I don't believe that pasteurization is a requirement for imported products.
Having said that, I am would not be surprised that making cheese here in the US may be subject to totally different rules.
There are some stores that specialize in selling imported European cheeses. If you miss European cheese that much you may want to research and give one a call.
No, you are missing the point of interest. When you loan an amount with interest, you are accounting for the future value of money since money tends to depreciate due to inflation. It's simple microeconomics: $1,000 20 years ago is not the same as $1,000 today. $1,000 20 years ago is equivalent to roughly $1,500 today, assuming a very conservative 2% yearly inflation compounded yearly. That doesn't take into account the amount of money that the lender can make with that $1,000 if he invested it in a business for 20 years instead of lending it.
So in any type of free market society, loans would be fiancial suicide if interest could not be charged. As the incentive to loan, the interest rate is designed to yield a small profit. Banks make money because in essence they create money (due to the money supply multiplying factor), so they can make a small profit on loans because they expand and contract the money supply and thus keep both runaway inflation and runaway recession under some level of control. You'd be surprised how thin the profit margins of banks actually are. If you are a bank, it's extremely easy to go into bankrupcy if you aren't paying very close attention. The risks they take and the services they provide is in essence how and why they get paid.
I suggest that you read a little bit about Keynesian macroeconomics and how modern free markets couldn't exist without banks because of the effect that banks have on the money supply due to interest loans. A measured amout of what you call "greed", my friend, has in a sense made possible the computer and the Internet that you are using to read this, and has brought a higher standard of living to the world than almost any other force, including religion, and I say that while being deeply religious myself.
So, how many tons of food and manufacturing goods did New York and San Francisco produced this year?
So what changed? Do you think that the country changed, or that you (liberals) did?
Nice post, but besides your obvious informal logical fallacy about a totalitarial regime(a.k.a. "slippery slope", I suggest that you enroll in a logic course), the rest of your post was just undiferentiated rhetorical goo. Please try to be coherent next time.
While there is no question that money and the promise of riches were also motivations, saying that some of the reasons behind the first waves of immigration had nothing to do with practicing a religion freely ignores the historical record.
I don't deny that the push for religious freedom resulted, ironically, in cases of religious intolerance during colonial times. But religion through the US's history has been a deep motivation for immigration. But even if you wish to keep living in your bubble of revisionism, I challenge you to deny that religion didn't play a part during the foundation and growth of the US, and doesn't play a part today.
You see, a huge portion of the US's population is religous and thus conservative when it comes to morality. That's the way it's always been, period. (Remember how the first immigrants to the colonies were looking for religious freedom?). There are even theories that argue that one of the reasons why the US became such an overwhelming economic powerhouse is precisely because of religion. The theory is called the Protestan Ethic. You can google a bit about it if you're interested. The rough gist of it is that if you have a population that has a tendency to be religous and value hard, honest work, economic prosperity is bound to follow (sort of a socioeconomic version of good karma).
The United States is not nor will ever be Europe. The mindset of large urban centers such as New York, LA and San Francisco is not the mindset of the rest of the country by a long shot. Failing to recognize these simple facts about the US means lost elections, and confused foreigners.
So, the democrats have had dibs on color for a long time.
I have to agree with you on those points. Still, the debate between creationism/evolution doesn't always seem to follow them.
In other words, the debate is, as you've pointed out, about people that think the world was created in a way inconsistent with the scientific evidence. However, it is also about people that argue that the scientific evidence is inconsistent with faith. This is an important distinction that needs to be made.
That's supposed to be orange-ade, not lemonade.
I know that your user id is in the 600k range, but you must not read slashdot much if you think that's the crux of the debate. How many anti-religious rants have been posted so far about God and religion being fairy tales, about believers being dellusional, etc? The whole point of this story is about how science provides evidence that creationism is wrong.
Your point about falsifiability (is that a word?) is a bit of a problem for me to agree on. Science is falsifiable, but misplaced faith can also be false (worshiping false Gods, etc). Of course that strict creationism is falsifiable! But you seem to be lumping strict creationism with othe forms that aren't, as you've described, falsifiable.
In fact, creationism takes many forms, from the scientist that believes that God created evolution, to the strict creationsis that believes the world was literally created in 7 days. All the while, "anti-creationism" works the same way (from the scientist that belives that evolution disproves God, to the scientist that believes evolution merely demonstrates that the book of Genesis involves parable instead of being entirely literal).
But yet many take perfectly rational positions and lump them together with irrational ones in an attempt to discredit the other side (such as strict creationists lumped together with other believers, or religious but rational scientists being lumped together with scientist that belive that science is a religion).
My point is that at the end of the day, we seem to be comparing apples and Oranges, blending them all together, and endlessly arguing about whether we have lemonade or apple cider!
My goal is not to argue against faith, and in fact I am deeply religious. My goal is to point out that God gave us both a brain, and faith. Using both appropiately needn't involve contradiction. If one seems to contradict the other then maybe we need to reexamine our assumptions.
That's a variation of the same theme: That God created a mechanism that ultimately resulted on humans. Whether humas are the ultimate result or not, is again, virtually entirely an item of faith.
There are very few scientists, however, who believe in creationism, which says that the universe was created 5,000 years ago.
That's an interesting point, and reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the part about an alien race creating the earth complete with fake dinosaur bones, but I digress. I think that the stance of strict creationism can be as pretentious as the stance denying the existance of a creator via science: A strict creationist pretends to know how the technicalities of how God did things.
But again, I would answer that isn't the point of scripture at all. There is no "mix three portions of faith and one grain of sand to cure the blind" type of technicalities in the Bible. Because the point of science and religion answer two different questions about our existance: One seeks knowledge and facts, the other, meaning and wisdom.
It's kind of like science proving that God is not real. The effort is meant to fail because science cannot deal with God because it isn't designed to. On the other side, religion cannot, for the most part, deal with science because religion rests on a premise of faith which is by definition, unprovable belief.
When both sides are not even supposed to have common ground on which to argue, the creationist/evolutionist debate is a non-sequitur on both sides.
But, I'm not going to sink to the same level that you've sunk to. Since your response indicates that you don't care about discussion, only about irrationally defending your ignorant, selfish, make-believe view of the world, I'm not going to waste my time.
I will, however, leave you with a few links. If you're halfway honest with yourself you may even click on some of them.
The Myth of divorce. The 50% divorce rate is a myth, but then again I doubt you know the difference between myth and fact.
Divorces show that children require both parents.
Some general reading about parents.
And here you reinforce my suspicion that you have no clue about how to raise children, and I'll go on a limb and say that you're probably not even in a committed relationship, to boot. At night, a mother will wake at the slightest cry from a newborn. Fathers usually sleep the night through. Between mothers and fathers, and between men and women for that matter, there are deep, proven and well-understood differences which are psychological, emotional, and intellectual. Millions of years of evolution have seen to that. I suggest that you do a little research.
Two stable gay guys can raise a child better than a "normal" man/woman couple where one or both is/are alcoholic, abusive, etc.
So what does that prove? That alcoholics or psychogically damaged people make bad parents, nothing more. To continue with your logic, an abusing, alcoholic father can raise a child better than a rabid pack of wolves. It's all a non-sequitur when it comes to the discussion, though.
Try to see the forest despite of all of those trees that you keep describing. You seem to talk about exceptions and aberrations of normal parenting, about the extremes of that continuum which you mention. However, you completely ignore the center, where most families actually are, where the government is interested in because it provides for the most efficient institution for securing a healthy next generation.
So, it comes down to evaluating each situation based upon all of the factors in that situation. Never a "...heterosexual unions combine the best of both worlds and despite their flaws, they are the ideal for that task".
That is the most assinine, useless approach I've ever heard, because it's impossible to thoroughly evaluate each situation of anything, and because trying to do so leads nowhere. Have you ever heard the term "paralysis by analysis?" That is exactly what you're describing. Your position is analogous to arguing against voting or sales tax because after all, each situation is different since each person earns differtly and can pax sales tax differently. How can you give the same value to the vote of the guy that didn't research as to the vote of the guy that spent months researching every candidate?
No, it's not supposed to cause third degree burns at all. Not unless it had been superheated by custom-made equipment. The lawsuit wasn't blaming McDonnalds for spilled coffee, it was making McDonnalds responsible for it's dangerously and unecessarily high temperature.
Another thing, the lady didn't want millions of dollars. She just wanted some help with her medical bills as a result of the injury. When McDonnalds in essence told her to f*ck off, she took them to court to recoup some medical costs. The punitive damages were decided on by the jury, and later they were reduced on appeal.
The crux of the case rests in the fact that McDonnalds had other serious burn incidents which they ignored. McDonnald's coffee-making equipment is custom-made because normal industrial coffee machines just can't get the coffee that hot. McDonnald's negligence was that they had been made aware several times that their coffee was unsafe and far hotter than the norm, yet the did nothing but stonewall and ignore legitimate complaints until the court slapped them with the veredict.
Normally I am all for personal responsibility, but maybe you should read the actual case before talking out of the wrong hole.
I am not arguing that same-sex couples aren't capable of raising children and given the choice between a child in an orphanage and one adopted by a same sex couple, the second choice is clearly better. However, what I am arguing is that whenever possible heterosexual unions combine the best of both worlds and despite their flaws, they are the ideal for that task.
And so because there are problems with it (divorce, death, etc) we shouldn't have an ideal societal unit that could best raise the next generation? Wow, that's some logic there!
On a related note, the conversation has drifted to that of preemptive presidential goals since you brought it up, right? I don't mind letting the conversation flow in the direction that you've pointed it in.
So JFK did not have from the beginning the goal to get rid of communism if at all possible? Why did he commit troops to Vietnam then?
Anyway, since when is having a plan before getting elected a problem? Isn't contingency planning expected of any halfway-decent president even before getting into the Whitehouse? In fact, wasn't that a goal of Clinton's as well shortly before leaving office?