Since I replied with the correction because of your comment about it being grammar Nazi bait, I guess you could categorize me as a comedian. Whether that means I'm funny or not is an exercise for a different post.
Your use of begging the question isn't for grammar Nazis, it's for logic Nazis. Begging the question is giving an answer that makes the questioner ask the same question again. It's a type of circular break in logic. That's why the turtles example is used.
The most obvious indicator of impending societal failure is your complete inability to read the article and understand it. She wasn't fired at all. Some parents withdrew their kids from her class.
I've seen this particular canard a thousand times, and it's always missing the part about where the beer isn't beer, it's oxygen so nobody can do without it. It's also missing the part where tax breaks don't go to people who don't pay taxes, where nobody ever gets more tax back in rebates than they paid, and the explanation that "beer" doesn't represent taxation very well at all because taxes aren't a commodity. But yeah, other than that it's deeply insightful.
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
And then there's the large array of people who don't fit the false dichotomy, and who have a better grasp of taxation and economics than you care to give them credit for. I for one can't understand how the logic of the "savings" discussion could come to pass, but I'm quite capable of getting that the explanation why it's incomprehensible is that it's complete crap that doesn't fit real life in any way. See how easy that was?
It's different in that it's a traveling pathogen. If you get lung cancer from secondhand smoke, and then get in a car accident, the EMT that's holding the bandages on your belly wound will never, ever get your lung cancer from doing it, but there's a nonzero chance he could pick up your case if HIV. Pathogens that can travel through the population are a dangerous thing to play with.
Similarly, Amazon has already revoked ownership of books -- ironically, George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" -- from on the Kindle; there's no reason to believe they couldn't revoke anything, including the books which persuaded you to buy the Kindle in the first place (if they weren't the Orwell books already revoked).
The difference in this particular example is that Amazon refunded the money charged when they revoked access to the titles. That's not the same as the game in TFA because he didn't give buyers their money back.
This is a myth. They could easily design cars so that in low speed crashes they don't deform and are thus cheap to repair. They choose not to.
Tinfoil hat much? I notice you provide absolutely no evidence to back up your claim, while I can cite the fact that pretty much the entire auto industry designs cars the way they do because there are a multitude of studies showing that such actions reduce injuries due to collisions. Back it up or pack it up.
The vast majority of crashes are low speed and the insurance industry should be calling the car industry on it.
So your stance is that a multibillion dollar industry that makes its bread and butter on playing the odds "should" call out the automakers on something that would certainly save them a ton of money, but somehow isn't? Keep trying, and next time log in.
A private school would have no choice but to do the upgrades -- just as McDonald's has no choice but to meet accessibility laws (regardless of if they've ever had a customer who needed such features).
Just to open, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since private schools don't usually work by the same laws as public-accessible businesses. Unlike McDonald's, where's there's an expectation that any member of the public can walk through the door, private schools are limited access like country clubs. There's some overlap due to building codes (which covers things you mention like sprinklers and structural soundness), but stuff like the ADA doesn't apply the same way.
Back on topic, it's easy to blame the schools for not being more proactive about accessibility, but many schools were built long before accessibility laws existed and trying to get the general public to pay big money for compliance when there's no student who actually needs it is a fantasyland idea. There's a reason why it happens the way it does time and time again, and while you can call it "ridiculous" all you like, even if the schools proactively complied they'd still be in a position where voucher students who are taking "average cost per student" dollar figures will be depleting more money than they require to educate. As to private schools having no choice but to do the upgrades, good luck with that too. The evidence that that's not happening is all over the country, where private schools don't meet ADA requirements year after year but aren't shut down, and they turn away special needs students constantly citing inability to acommodate and again, they aren't shut down. There are several private schools within an hour of my house that have upper floors entirely inaccessible to wheelchairs and they've been around for decades. If it's such a stern requirement, how can that be?
As to your idea that only ADA compliant schools would qualify for vouchers, that'll have roughly the same effect as voting down vouchers, so go for it. Why would any private school spend the money necessary to qualify to receive voucher students when those students won't be bringing in nearly enough dollars to offset the cost of those upgrades? Private schools that are hurting badly enough for students that voucher influx would save them won't have the cash to do the work, and private schools with waiting lists will have no motivation to spend it.
There's simply no way for a school district to be able to afford to pay $250K/year in your extreme example for each kid with special needs. At that rate, you could hire a full-time nurse, a special ed coordinator, a speech pathologist, and a couple of interns from the community college looking for job experience FOR EACH KID.
Or you could build one elevator on the school and split the cost among eight students and you're covered. How's that for a concrete (and steel) figure? Sure, you can say that it's a one time expenditure, but I can also say that we don't have eight students that require an elevator for access and there was a lot more spent on handicap access than just that. As I said in another comment, the majority of expenditure for special ed isn't staff, it's accomodations. Cost-per-student calculations include these expenditures, but present voucher systems don't discount vouchers for stuff like this that public schools legally have to provide but private schools don't, so kids who take their vouchers and leave are taking more money than they take to educate, and there's no break point after which the public school can say "we no longer need to accomodate because we've lost a certain number of students".
A kid who is just in a wheelchair doesn't cost $250K a year to educate. Something else is very wrong with that student and you must be confusing other types of basic care for education.
One of the major costs of educating such a child is accessibility and refits. Unless the school that child attends is very new, it will usually require updates, which can be amortized across years and other kids but still makes for huge budget expenditures. For an older school that hasn't had accessibility issues in the past, a single kid in a wheelchair can mean millions in physical plant costs, and so even a kid who needs no special assistance with learning can cost a school district a king's ransom. One of my son's classmates has serious mobility issues but no noticable mental difficulties, and the amount of money the school system had to spend to make reasonable accomodations made his education very costly, even though it was just one bathroom refit, rebuilding entrances for access, some electric doors and an elevator. No private school is going to be willing to pour that kind of money into a student and no voucher system would treat him anywhere near fairly. So, not only did I not choose an absurd example, I chose a real-life issue.
What you (so very many of the voucher crowd) fail to realize is that vouchers fall apart when it comes to edge cases, like special education. The voucher system is entirely unworkable for a kid in a wheelchair who costs the school $250,000 a year to educate, because nobody in the voucher system has ever, ever said that that child should get a voucher for the real cost of his education. The result is that public schools end up with a disproportionate number of special ed students (which is exactly what happens today because private schools virtually always refuse to take them on, citing cost to accomodate) and the vouchers means the funding leaves the school. When a district says that it costs $9,000 per student, they have to include these special cases, but when each student leaves with their $9,000 voucher in hand, they're taking away from the school more than it really costs to educate them because of this averaging. That's the major failure in the voucher system, and most people I've encountered who push for vouchers have never even heard of this problem, much less offer any realistic way to solve it.
The main argument was that it would cut funding to public schools. To which I answer, So? It may cut funding to PUBLIC schools, but it also cut the number of students.
This quote is proof positive that you didn't consider the differential cost of educating students, which is the crux of my comment.
Since the Bible says that knowledge, wisdom and understanding are good things.
The Devil, as always, is in the details. The organizations that drive the Christian faith have a very poor track record for what you're trying to put forward. When science and faith are not at odds, these organizations have no trouble with science, but when science rubs counter to their beliefs they have historically pushed back very, very hard. There's even a word for it: heresy. That word used to describe a criminal offense, and things like heliocentrism cost more than one person his life. I agree that science and faith don't have to be at odds, but when large groups of people are fighting against teaching evolution in school for the specific, stated reason that it goes against God's teachings, your statements ring very hollow. Clean your own house before you try to make someone out to be ignorant just because he points out the actions of a large chunk of your fellow adherents.
And really, there may be people in the US who actually act like the equivalent of the Taliban, but if you believe that any candidate currently running on any major, and most minor, party tickets is like the actual Taliban, you're either displaying ignorance or a complete lack of perspective. Knowing what the real Taliban does to people makes me borderline disgusted when I hear the term used flippantly like that.
The heart of the matter isn't a matter of perspective. The heart of the matter is (the Taliban|Rick Santorum) being willing to give religious belief the force of law. If the Taliban didn't have the force of law, the level of enforcement would be irrelevant.
Sometimes calling a monster a monster is necessary. The idea that he "merely" wants to incarcerate homosexuals rather than execute them is the part that should make you disgusted. The fact that the Taliban is more brutal doesn't change Rick Santorum's failings. If the people living under today's Taliban had stopped them long ago when they weren't significantly worse than any other group, would they be suffering under such oppression today? Keeping our house clean is the only way to prevent the start of that sort of slide, and showing the world Rick Santorum's failings is part of that cleanup.
Again, what is James Randi doing.Taking a few anecdotal examples and condemning the whole religious organizations. That is what many of the comments are doing as well. When we talk about religion, we can be bigoted, but now when we talk about skeptics?
You just did exactly what I accused you of. To shine the light on it, why do you assume that all skeptics are like James Randi, or necessarily agree with him?
I am not bigoted against skeptics or religious people or whomever.
Assuming that everyone who is a skeptic is like James Randi is the very definition of bigotry.
Yet such a thing does not happen in the realm of skeptics. They scream that there is no proof that vaccines cause harm.
Not everyone who is a skeptic ascribes to that idea. Again, it's just your prejudice that assumes that all of them do so you can swing your broad brush around without the inconvenience of having to admit that there's some people with a more moderate approach.
Take BPA, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. Non of these are proven to be harmful, yet we see that due to consumer expectations, they have largely been removed from may products so that consumers have a choice.
Just to correct the error, trans fats have been proven to significantly increase the risk of heart attacks. And if you think that high fructose corn syrup has been largely removed from anything, you need your head examined.
No one cares about the masses.
Oh, boo hoo. It's the masses who decide this stuff, so if they don't care for themselves why would they expect fringe groups to do so?
Your point is getting lost, then, in your approach. To give you the most obvious example from your own post, why do you think I hate you because you think that homosexuality is wrong? The problem I've always had with the whole thing is that religion is very good at cultivating an "us versus them" mentality. Also, unless your faith is very unusual I'd have to see proof that it teaches adherents that the "bad" things don't "cause others harm" and therefore should not be fought against.
I've never had to vote for or against gay marriage, I don't think I would vote against it though.
According to your comment above, you should be actively voting for gay marriage, unless you have some belief that gay marriage intrinsically "harms others". Your comment about homosexuality being wrong in your belief and your lack of surety in how you'd vote on the issue (as a result of that belief, I can only assume) is about the best example I've seen to answer "what has my faith done to you?"
To take the example of Catholic archbishops railing against contraception in health plans, I don't see a lot of (or any at all, in fact) Catholics saying, "Hey, this fight is counterproductive." Now, I'm aware that many other religions have the same problem, but that's my point. I'd have a lot more faith in faith if adherents would stand up the the nutters more often.
Dude, did you even bother to read the rest of the stuff that I wrote? What has my faith done to you? What reason do you have to hate it?
The short form is that it drives adherents to try to make governance fit their faith. The fight over gay marriage springs readily to mind, but it's decidedly easy to find others. Until your faith stops considering such actions "good" then it's causing harm due to your belief system.
Don't come with big bang and evolution and all that now, saying I believe in God doesn't make me so closed-minded as not to believe in that, or at least view it as a possibility. If there was a big bang, it doesn't mean there isn't a God.
Does it make you vote against teaching evolution in schools? It motivates an awful lot of your fellow adherents to do exactly that.
Your whole comment dies on prejudice. Not all skeptics are identical (and for that matter, neither are all religious fanatics, although they're generally more homogenous than "skeptics"). Taking a few examples of extremism and trying to use them to define the group is an utter logical fail, and at the end it makes your comment entirely worthless. That's too bad, because I see the point you're getting at and it would be a good point to make if only you could make it without being so badly bigoted.
Your understanding of the economics here is faulty. The breakdown is in thinking that food scarcity is one-sided. Food becomes scarce because it becomes uneconomical to make it. The price has to rise to make up that deficit, and then food production goes back to "normal", but with more cost. That cost doesn't translate into more freely spendable money for the farmers, because the supply chain is why the cost went up in the first place.
More to the point, it's not people taking long expensive showers that eats up the water supply. A factory uses ten times the water that a town does. The large majority of water use in most places where farming is done is business, and they've been unsuccessfully pushing for more water projects for decades.
Lastly, if water rose to fifty cents a gallon in any community, demand for the water would drop to zero because nobody could afford to run any kind of business, and the residents would move because there'd be no work. There's an upper limit on how much water can cost before it's cheaper to move operations than try to irrigate locally.
This really isn't a problem. Telling the judge, "I have my password on a spreadsheet named X found on Y" would be sufficient revelation. They don't generally hold people in contempt for not memorizing stuff if they provide it by other means.
Not much. In the time since the Earth formed, it's managed to vacuum up just about all of the debris that would intersect its (and the Moon's) orbit. So there are impacts since a billion years ago on the Moon but very few compared to what happened back then.
No erosion from temperature changes?
Again, not a lot. due to its composition, there's not a ton of erosion due to temperature changes. There's some, but not nearly enough to level the surface like an atmosphere does.
What kind of material Moon is made off?
The crust of the Moon is composed mostly of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum.
The lake is at sea level and tests confirm that it's unsalinated. If there was any water flow, it would have to be bidirectional which would introduce sea water (else no biology could "wash in"). Plus, under-ice mapping confirms that it's cut off from any other water.
There's no consideration of permafrost since they haven't hit the ground yet, and they don't plan to do so. They're drilling through the miles of ice laying on top of the lake. The ground is under the lake, which is under the ice. Radiant heat doesn't have any effect on this operation since, again, they're not drilling through ground.
This is exactly what should have happened: tell the infringer to either pay the licensing fees, or go and duplicate the effort to create his own picture. The idea is not copyrighted; he is free to copy the idea.
There are limits to this idea, which I can show with another example. Suppose you write a book. Now suppose someone else uses direct copies of your book to make money. You insist either that he pay a license fee or desist, and in response he "writes" his own book, using the same plot and characters and chapters and wording, but renames the main character and starts marketing "Harry Johnson and the Sorcerer's Stone" for profit. Does this sound like he's taking the idea and recasting it, or does it sound more like he's still ripping off the creative content but trying to veneer it enough to dodge the original intent of copyright? If he had spelling errors in his book, it still wouldn't change the creative intent and that's what happened here. It's not the copyright of ideas so much as the "replace an infringing work with a replica that's as identical as I'm capable of making it" that burns his case down. The fact that he was incapable of the effort doesn't change the fact that his intent was to create a replica for the sole reason of evading copyright.
It's specifically for this reason that contempt can run longer than the sentence for the crime being charged. If you'd be better off sitting for contempt than the crime, what's the motivation to disclose? Therefore, the punishment for contempt must be more onerous than the punishment for the crime specifically to motivate disclosure.
That statement is plainly, simply and otherwise wrong. Moving into Greece and getting a Greek citizenship does not make me Greek. There is a nation of Greek people, and I do not become a part of that nation by merely moving in there.
I'll agree that moving to Greece and obtaining citizenship doesn't give you Grecian heritage, but you'd have a hard fight to say that you're not Greek. That's my point. You talk about Jews and you talk about Israelis, but while you argue that they aren't the same you treat arguments against Isreali self governance in terms of people "stating that every ethnic group of people in the world deserve self governance except the Jews." To make the same argument, you'd have to put forward that the Greek government should represent only people who are ethnically Greek rather than people like your friend who are citizens but weren't born there.
What it boils down to in my mind is that I don't think any ethnic group should have an overarching right to self govern at the expense of geography and their own concept of citizenship. I'd argue the same if people who were ethnically British tried to set up a government in Britain that failed to define that term for citizens. If Israel is a Jewish nation, then something went wrong. Israel should be an Israeli nation that governs whoever gets citizenship, and it should not be deciding citizenship or treating citizens differently solely on the basis of heritage to a certain bloodline. Of all the peoples on Earth, I would have figured that Jews would have learned that lesson.
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Since I replied with the correction because of your comment about it being grammar Nazi bait, I guess you could categorize me as a comedian. Whether that means I'm funny or not is an exercise for a different post.
Virg
Your use of begging the question isn't for grammar Nazis, it's for logic Nazis. Begging the question is giving an answer that makes the questioner ask the same question again. It's a type of circular break in logic. That's why the turtles example is used.
What you're describing is leading the discussion.
Virg
The most obvious indicator of impending societal failure is your complete inability to read the article and understand it. She wasn't fired at all. Some parents withdrew their kids from her class.
Virg
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
And then there's the large array of people who don't fit the false dichotomy, and who have a better grasp of taxation and economics than you care to give them credit for. I for one can't understand how the logic of the "savings" discussion could come to pass, but I'm quite capable of getting that the explanation why it's incomprehensible is that it's complete crap that doesn't fit real life in any way. See how easy that was?
Virg
It's different in that it's a traveling pathogen. If you get lung cancer from secondhand smoke, and then get in a car accident, the EMT that's holding the bandages on your belly wound will never, ever get your lung cancer from doing it, but there's a nonzero chance he could pick up your case if HIV. Pathogens that can travel through the population are a dangerous thing to play with.
Virg
Similarly, Amazon has already revoked ownership of books -- ironically, George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" -- from on the Kindle; there's no reason to believe they couldn't revoke anything, including the books which persuaded you to buy the Kindle in the first place (if they weren't the Orwell books already revoked).
The difference in this particular example is that Amazon refunded the money charged when they revoked access to the titles. That's not the same as the game in TFA because he didn't give buyers their money back.
Virg
This is a myth. They could easily design cars so that in low speed crashes they don't deform and are thus cheap to repair. They choose not to.
Tinfoil hat much? I notice you provide absolutely no evidence to back up your claim, while I can cite the fact that pretty much the entire auto industry designs cars the way they do because there are a multitude of studies showing that such actions reduce injuries due to collisions. Back it up or pack it up.
The vast majority of crashes are low speed and the insurance industry should be calling the car industry on it.
So your stance is that a multibillion dollar industry that makes its bread and butter on playing the odds "should" call out the automakers on something that would certainly save them a ton of money, but somehow isn't? Keep trying, and next time log in.
Virg Virg
A private school would have no choice but to do the upgrades -- just as McDonald's has no choice but to meet accessibility laws (regardless of if they've ever had a customer who needed such features).
Just to open, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since private schools don't usually work by the same laws as public-accessible businesses. Unlike McDonald's, where's there's an expectation that any member of the public can walk through the door, private schools are limited access like country clubs. There's some overlap due to building codes (which covers things you mention like sprinklers and structural soundness), but stuff like the ADA doesn't apply the same way.
Back on topic, it's easy to blame the schools for not being more proactive about accessibility, but many schools were built long before accessibility laws existed and trying to get the general public to pay big money for compliance when there's no student who actually needs it is a fantasyland idea. There's a reason why it happens the way it does time and time again, and while you can call it "ridiculous" all you like, even if the schools proactively complied they'd still be in a position where voucher students who are taking "average cost per student" dollar figures will be depleting more money than they require to educate. As to private schools having no choice but to do the upgrades, good luck with that too. The evidence that that's not happening is all over the country, where private schools don't meet ADA requirements year after year but aren't shut down, and they turn away special needs students constantly citing inability to acommodate and again, they aren't shut down. There are several private schools within an hour of my house that have upper floors entirely inaccessible to wheelchairs and they've been around for decades. If it's such a stern requirement, how can that be?
As to your idea that only ADA compliant schools would qualify for vouchers, that'll have roughly the same effect as voting down vouchers, so go for it. Why would any private school spend the money necessary to qualify to receive voucher students when those students won't be bringing in nearly enough dollars to offset the cost of those upgrades? Private schools that are hurting badly enough for students that voucher influx would save them won't have the cash to do the work, and private schools with waiting lists will have no motivation to spend it.
Virg
There's simply no way for a school district to be able to afford to pay $250K/year in your extreme example for each kid with special needs. At that rate, you could hire a full-time nurse, a special ed coordinator, a speech pathologist, and a couple of interns from the community college looking for job experience FOR EACH KID.
Or you could build one elevator on the school and split the cost among eight students and you're covered. How's that for a concrete (and steel) figure? Sure, you can say that it's a one time expenditure, but I can also say that we don't have eight students that require an elevator for access and there was a lot more spent on handicap access than just that. As I said in another comment, the majority of expenditure for special ed isn't staff, it's accomodations. Cost-per-student calculations include these expenditures, but present voucher systems don't discount vouchers for stuff like this that public schools legally have to provide but private schools don't, so kids who take their vouchers and leave are taking more money than they take to educate, and there's no break point after which the public school can say "we no longer need to accomodate because we've lost a certain number of students".
Virg
A kid who is just in a wheelchair doesn't cost $250K a year to educate. Something else is very wrong with that student and you must be confusing other types of basic care for education.
One of the major costs of educating such a child is accessibility and refits. Unless the school that child attends is very new, it will usually require updates, which can be amortized across years and other kids but still makes for huge budget expenditures. For an older school that hasn't had accessibility issues in the past, a single kid in a wheelchair can mean millions in physical plant costs, and so even a kid who needs no special assistance with learning can cost a school district a king's ransom. One of my son's classmates has serious mobility issues but no noticable mental difficulties, and the amount of money the school system had to spend to make reasonable accomodations made his education very costly, even though it was just one bathroom refit, rebuilding entrances for access, some electric doors and an elevator. No private school is going to be willing to pour that kind of money into a student and no voucher system would treat him anywhere near fairly. So, not only did I not choose an absurd example, I chose a real-life issue.
Virg
The main argument was that it would cut funding to public schools. To which I answer, So? It may cut funding to PUBLIC schools, but it also cut the number of students.
This quote is proof positive that you didn't consider the differential cost of educating students, which is the crux of my comment.
Virg
Since the Bible says that knowledge, wisdom and understanding are good things.
The Devil, as always, is in the details. The organizations that drive the Christian faith have a very poor track record for what you're trying to put forward. When science and faith are not at odds, these organizations have no trouble with science, but when science rubs counter to their beliefs they have historically pushed back very, very hard. There's even a word for it: heresy. That word used to describe a criminal offense, and things like heliocentrism cost more than one person his life. I agree that science and faith don't have to be at odds, but when large groups of people are fighting against teaching evolution in school for the specific, stated reason that it goes against God's teachings, your statements ring very hollow. Clean your own house before you try to make someone out to be ignorant just because he points out the actions of a large chunk of your fellow adherents.
Virg
And really, there may be people in the US who actually act like the equivalent of the Taliban, but if you believe that any candidate currently running on any major, and most minor, party tickets is like the actual Taliban, you're either displaying ignorance or a complete lack of perspective. Knowing what the real Taliban does to people makes me borderline disgusted when I hear the term used flippantly like that.
The heart of the matter isn't a matter of perspective. The heart of the matter is (the Taliban|Rick Santorum) being willing to give religious belief the force of law. If the Taliban didn't have the force of law, the level of enforcement would be irrelevant.
Sometimes calling a monster a monster is necessary. The idea that he "merely" wants to incarcerate homosexuals rather than execute them is the part that should make you disgusted. The fact that the Taliban is more brutal doesn't change Rick Santorum's failings. If the people living under today's Taliban had stopped them long ago when they weren't significantly worse than any other group, would they be suffering under such oppression today? Keeping our house clean is the only way to prevent the start of that sort of slide, and showing the world Rick Santorum's failings is part of that cleanup.
Virg
Again, what is James Randi doing.Taking a few anecdotal examples and condemning the whole religious organizations. That is what many of the comments are doing as well. When we talk about religion, we can be bigoted, but now when we talk about skeptics?
You just did exactly what I accused you of. To shine the light on it, why do you assume that all skeptics are like James Randi, or necessarily agree with him?
I am not bigoted against skeptics or religious people or whomever.
Assuming that everyone who is a skeptic is like James Randi is the very definition of bigotry.
Yet such a thing does not happen in the realm of skeptics. They scream that there is no proof that vaccines cause harm.
Not everyone who is a skeptic ascribes to that idea. Again, it's just your prejudice that assumes that all of them do so you can swing your broad brush around without the inconvenience of having to admit that there's some people with a more moderate approach.
Take BPA, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. Non of these are proven to be harmful, yet we see that due to consumer expectations, they have largely been removed from may products so that consumers have a choice.
Just to correct the error, trans fats have been proven to significantly increase the risk of heart attacks. And if you think that high fructose corn syrup has been largely removed from anything, you need your head examined.
No one cares about the masses.
Oh, boo hoo. It's the masses who decide this stuff, so if they don't care for themselves why would they expect fringe groups to do so?
Virg
I've never had to vote for or against gay marriage, I don't think I would vote against it though.
According to your comment above, you should be actively voting for gay marriage, unless you have some belief that gay marriage intrinsically "harms others". Your comment about homosexuality being wrong in your belief and your lack of surety in how you'd vote on the issue (as a result of that belief, I can only assume) is about the best example I've seen to answer "what has my faith done to you?"
To take the example of Catholic archbishops railing against contraception in health plans, I don't see a lot of (or any at all, in fact) Catholics saying, "Hey, this fight is counterproductive." Now, I'm aware that many other religions have the same problem, but that's my point. I'd have a lot more faith in faith if adherents would stand up the the nutters more often.
Virg
Dude, did you even bother to read the rest of the stuff that I wrote? What has my faith done to you? What reason do you have to hate it?
The short form is that it drives adherents to try to make governance fit their faith. The fight over gay marriage springs readily to mind, but it's decidedly easy to find others. Until your faith stops considering such actions "good" then it's causing harm due to your belief system.
Don't come with big bang and evolution and all that now, saying I believe in God doesn't make me so closed-minded as not to believe in that, or at least view it as a possibility. If there was a big bang, it doesn't mean there isn't a God.
Does it make you vote against teaching evolution in schools? It motivates an awful lot of your fellow adherents to do exactly that.
Virg
Your whole comment dies on prejudice. Not all skeptics are identical (and for that matter, neither are all religious fanatics, although they're generally more homogenous than "skeptics"). Taking a few examples of extremism and trying to use them to define the group is an utter logical fail, and at the end it makes your comment entirely worthless. That's too bad, because I see the point you're getting at and it would be a good point to make if only you could make it without being so badly bigoted.
Virg
Your understanding of the economics here is faulty. The breakdown is in thinking that food scarcity is one-sided. Food becomes scarce because it becomes uneconomical to make it. The price has to rise to make up that deficit, and then food production goes back to "normal", but with more cost. That cost doesn't translate into more freely spendable money for the farmers, because the supply chain is why the cost went up in the first place.
More to the point, it's not people taking long expensive showers that eats up the water supply. A factory uses ten times the water that a town does. The large majority of water use in most places where farming is done is business, and they've been unsuccessfully pushing for more water projects for decades.
Lastly, if water rose to fifty cents a gallon in any community, demand for the water would drop to zero because nobody could afford to run any kind of business, and the residents would move because there'd be no work. There's an upper limit on how much water can cost before it's cheaper to move operations than try to irrigate locally.
Virg
This really isn't a problem. Telling the judge, "I have my password on a spreadsheet named X found on Y" would be sufficient revelation. They don't generally hold people in contempt for not memorizing stuff if they provide it by other means.
Virg
No impacts from meteorites?
Not much. In the time since the Earth formed, it's managed to vacuum up just about all of the debris that would intersect its (and the Moon's) orbit. So there are impacts since a billion years ago on the Moon but very few compared to what happened back then.
No erosion from temperature changes?
Again, not a lot. due to its composition, there's not a ton of erosion due to temperature changes. There's some, but not nearly enough to level the surface like an atmosphere does.
What kind of material Moon is made off?
The crust of the Moon is composed mostly of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum.
Virg
The lake is at sea level and tests confirm that it's unsalinated. If there was any water flow, it would have to be bidirectional which would introduce sea water (else no biology could "wash in"). Plus, under-ice mapping confirms that it's cut off from any other water.
Virg
There's no consideration of permafrost since they haven't hit the ground yet, and they don't plan to do so. They're drilling through the miles of ice laying on top of the lake. The ground is under the lake, which is under the ice. Radiant heat doesn't have any effect on this operation since, again, they're not drilling through ground.
Virg
This is exactly what should have happened: tell the infringer to either pay the licensing fees, or go and duplicate the effort to create his own picture. The idea is not copyrighted; he is free to copy the idea.
There are limits to this idea, which I can show with another example. Suppose you write a book. Now suppose someone else uses direct copies of your book to make money. You insist either that he pay a license fee or desist, and in response he "writes" his own book, using the same plot and characters and chapters and wording, but renames the main character and starts marketing "Harry Johnson and the Sorcerer's Stone" for profit. Does this sound like he's taking the idea and recasting it, or does it sound more like he's still ripping off the creative content but trying to veneer it enough to dodge the original intent of copyright? If he had spelling errors in his book, it still wouldn't change the creative intent and that's what happened here. It's not the copyright of ideas so much as the "replace an infringing work with a replica that's as identical as I'm capable of making it" that burns his case down. The fact that he was incapable of the effort doesn't change the fact that his intent was to create a replica for the sole reason of evading copyright.
Virg
It's specifically for this reason that contempt can run longer than the sentence for the crime being charged. If you'd be better off sitting for contempt than the crime, what's the motivation to disclose? Therefore, the punishment for contempt must be more onerous than the punishment for the crime specifically to motivate disclosure.
Virg
That statement is plainly, simply and otherwise wrong. Moving into Greece and getting a Greek citizenship does not make me Greek. There is a nation of Greek people, and I do not become a part of that nation by merely moving in there.
I'll agree that moving to Greece and obtaining citizenship doesn't give you Grecian heritage, but you'd have a hard fight to say that you're not Greek. That's my point. You talk about Jews and you talk about Israelis, but while you argue that they aren't the same you treat arguments against Isreali self governance in terms of people "stating that every ethnic group of people in the world deserve self governance except the Jews." To make the same argument, you'd have to put forward that the Greek government should represent only people who are ethnically Greek rather than people like your friend who are citizens but weren't born there.
What it boils down to in my mind is that I don't think any ethnic group should have an overarching right to self govern at the expense of geography and their own concept of citizenship. I'd argue the same if people who were ethnically British tried to set up a government in Britain that failed to define that term for citizens. If Israel is a Jewish nation, then something went wrong. Israel should be an Israeli nation that governs whoever gets citizenship, and it should not be deciding citizenship or treating citizens differently solely on the basis of heritage to a certain bloodline. Of all the peoples on Earth, I would have figured that Jews would have learned that lesson.
Virg