I challenge you to demonstrate exactly how we know the earth goes around the sun. If you know the masses of the sun and earth and know the law of gravity, it is trivial. How do you determine the mass of the earth, the mass of the sun, and the law of gravity? It isn't easy.
Are you serious? We have spacecraft in orbit around the sun, flying to Mars and out of the solar system. Earlier, we bounced radar off Venus, measured stellar parallaxes, deflection of light due to the sun's gravity, transits of Venus, precise observations of planetary motions, etc. There are literally millions of measurements that prove a heliocentric solar system, quantitatively consistent with Newton's laws, measuring straightforward physical quantities like distance and time. High school students can analyze and model most of these things quantitatively even with a pocket calculator.
Understanding how greenhouse gases warm the earth is trivial in comparison. I can demonstrate the greenhouse effect on a tabletop, then show you the charts of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global average temperature.
No, you can't. You can do something on a tabletop that seems vaguely similar to the greenhouse effect, but is actually quite different. You can't even define what "global average temperatures" means with high school science, let along quantitatively related measurements to models.
I think the decision it's a 'tax' is a bit obvious. It's hard to see what else it could be
Why does it have to be anything? It could simply be a nonsensical law that is in violation of the Constitution.
And, of course, claiming that taxing health insurance (or the lack of health insurance) is an 'impermissible direct tax' is a bit of a Pandora's box,
The law is a mandate with a penalty for non-compliance. The law isn't written as a tax deduction for some voluntary choice. Even if the two had the same effect, it's not just the effect that matters, it's the wording of the law. If you think the same effect can be achieved with a law written in terms of tax deduction, Congress can pass the law again with acceptable wording.
Furthermore, even if it's a "Pandora's box", the sky wouldn't fall, since any and all those other laws would take a long time to come to the supreme court, giving Congress plenty of time to pass an amendment or fix any problems in other ways.
Of course, I think ending the system of complicated deductions would be a good thing anyway, as would putting some stricter limits again on what the federal government can do.
Try this experiment once: Try to convince someone that the sun goes around the earth that the earth actually goes around the sun. The chain of inference we had to use to deduce that is complex. That's why we didn't know until just hundreds of years ago.
It seems like you have serious gaps in your science education. Heliocentrism has been been around for more than 2000 years. And the experimental evidence for heliocentrism is overwhelming and understanding is literally high school math and physics.
Teaching climate change is easy. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When fossil fuels are burnt, they produce carbon dioxide. This will warm the planet. You can then show charts of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and the global mean temperature. It's actually pretty easy to understand the chain of evidence.
Yes, you just illustrated my point: you don't want to teach science, you want teach a bunch of phrases that you have no idea what they actually mean. I'm not surprised: if you think heliocentrism is obscure and difficult, then obviously your view of science is that it is always mysterious and impenetrable.
But, in fact, planetary motions are high school science, while climatology is far more complex.
Cultivate a "fuck you" attitude but learn how to mask it lest you be in situations where Bible Thumpers have the power to punish you.
Cultivate the same "fuck you" attitude not just towards Bible thumpers, but also towards "progressives" and "socialists", who are misusing science and reason just as much as the Bible thumpers.
It may trouble people here to no end to know that some of the greatest scientific minds throughout history were also deeply religious
Many scientists have also been racist, or occultist, or all sorts of other -ists, that doesn't make those -isms rational or acceptable. In fact, scientists have no more trouble holding inconsistent beliefs in their heads as any other human being.
My big hang up with people who just hate god/religion/whatever is that you have no proof these things do not exist and there is certainly proof, according to the conjecture put forth by the religious, that god does exist
When it comes to the Christian God, proof of his existence or non-existence isn't the primary issue. The real issues are that the God described in the Bible is a reprehensible being, that parts of the morality and teleology preached by Christianity are offensive and immoral, and a lot of the writings and dogma are inconsistent and have obviously been manipulated and altered over time for political and economic purposes.
It should just be a hiring requirement for science teaches that they accept evolution as fact.
No, it should be a requirement that people who teach a scientific subject can explain the evidence for the prevailing theory, carry out experiments to test it, and use this to teach what science is all about. They should teach the scientific method and critical thinking. That is what science is about.
People who merely believe something without understanding the evidence for it have no business teaching science at all.
In order to understand climate change as a scientific subject, you need differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and computational modeling. Neither teachers nor students have anywhere near the necessary background. Not even the graph showing average global temperature increase is something that people in high school can generally understand how it was derived or what kind of statistics went into creating it. Anything you can teach about climate change in high school is going to be superficial and based on a political agenda.
That's completely different from evolution. People in high school have the necessary skills to understand evolution, what the evidence is, and how it works. They can even carry out experiments to demonstrate it happening and look at the raw data and understand how it leads to the conclusion that we're here because of evolution.
It's more than big enough to settle and support dozens of families and plantations. And the expeditions looking for Earhart haven't even come close to exploring it all.
The island is not that small, it has trees, shade, coconuts, lots of crabs, and a lagoon full of fish. It's probably a bit short of fresh water, but between coconuts, rain, and a simple solar still using a tarp, she should have been able to get by. And someone else seems to have been able to survive there by themselves for a few years.
Sure it has been grown in the US. Opium use was very widespread (laudanum, paregoric) in the US in the 19th century, and it was legal. The opium used was produced from US farms, including in California and the tobacco states. It was legal to do so until the late 30's.
Incidentally, just have a look at SuperPAC spending on candidates to see how ineffective that has been: SuperPACs together spent $60 million on Gingrich and Santorum, three times as much as on Romney, and what did it get them? Nothing.
Or do you think the Federal government should have no powers anymore? Of course you don't. See how silly that sounds when you read me writing it? I felt the same way about your hyperbolic statement.
The federal government should have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, no more. Reasoning like yours has been used to extend those powers arbitrarily and I think that should be stopped and reversed. That also seems to be the question SCOTUS is wrestling with. The fact that this has done before many times doesn't mean it isn't time to stop it. After all, it took more than a century to achieve racial equality under the law, and we still have not fully implemented the non-establishment clause.
If you don't see the disastrous effects of Bush v Gore, at the absolutely very least the part where it's declared nonprecedential,
No, I don't see it. I preferred Gore to Bush at the time, but a decision needed to be made, and the vote was close enough that they might as well have tossed a coin.
or the diastrous effects of unlimited corporate spending on politics on the basis that corporations are people with rights,
Money in politics is a problem, but your view that corporations corrupt our political process by spending vast amounts of money just completely misses reality. The way you put it, you make it sound like Coca Cola, Apple, and (even) Citigroup are spending billions of dollars to produce ads that then compel the mindless minions of American voters vote for the candidates they hand pick. That story is wrong on so many levels: corporations can spend money only on things related to their business or they get in trouble with their investors and the law, the corporate donations most big corporations make are fairly evenly split, most SuperPAC donations come from rich private individuals, American voters aren't mindless minions whose votes can be bought with slick ads, and some of the people complaining most loudly about corporate personhood (including Obama) have been among the worst offenders in handing over huge amounts of tax dollars to corporations.
In fact, Citizens United was about a bunch of rich private donors pooling their money through a "corporation" (Citizens United) in order to engage in anonymous free speech. "Corporate personhood" just means that this group of people has the same rights as any other group of people to do so. If you want to curtail that, the question is: what group of people do you think should have the right to engage in anonymous free speech? If I and a hundred friends want to pool our money and take out an anonymous attack ad on Obama or Romney, what legal form do you suggest we should use? That's not a rhetorical question: there may well be something wrong with the way we can do that right now, but revoking corporate personhood is not going to fix it, and it likely requires a constitutional amendment to fix.
In that case I don't think we share enough worldview to have a meaningful conversation.
Well, you better figure out how to have a meaningful conversation with people like me because there are a lot of us around: independent and Republican voters, the majority of SCOTUS, the Tea Party, Libertarians. And we do have a lot of common ground with you, since we see a lot of the same problems. We just think that your solutions are ineffective. So, do your homework and then come to the table with convincing and coherent arguments.
The Supreme Court has to decide whether the Congress has the power to collect money from all Americans if they don't purchase something mandated.
That's not a tax, that's a penalty, and that's what the act calls it. So, PPACA has a mandate and a penalty for non-compliance. Where is the tax? If you think the federal government can do this, what exactly can't it do then? Or do you think that there should be no constitutional limits on federal powers anymore?
That doesn't mean this Court will decide that way (they did after all decide both Bush v Gore and Citizens United without regard to law or disastrous effects on the country), but that is the basis for deciding.
Like PPACA, BCRA was a badly written law that catered to superficial populist sentiments. And what supposedly "disastrous effects" are you specifically referring to?
The problem is, the PPACA is a head tax that is proportional to the population (Because it's on the population instead of each state.), and thus explicitly allowed by the constitution.
PPACA says "either you buy this, or you pay this penalty". That is not a "head tax proportional to the population": the money people pay to a private insurer goes to a private company and is highly variable, and the penalty is paid only by a small fraction of the population. Arguably, it could be a tax if if were written as "you must pay this tax, but you can deduct from the tax anything you pay to a private insurer". Note that, already, that has potentially a different financial impact.
But dictionary and Wikipedia definitions really aren't important in a legal context; they can give you a general guideline but nothing more. A "tax" is something much more specific in a legal context. For example, the money I pay to a private insurer or the penalty aren't treated as a "tax" by other laws or treaties.
Furthermore, the Constitution doesn't grant Congress the right to tax people for any purpose whatsoever, it grants Congress the right to tax in order to raise money for specific purposes and under particular conditions. In particular, the taxing and spending clause was intended to allow the government to raise money, not to impose arbitrary regulations or punishments.
SCOTUS needs to determine whether PPACA is or is not a tax in the sense of US law, and it will likely draw up a list of criteria to determine that. If it passes that test, then it needs to determine whether it is the kind of tax that the federal government is empowered to impose. And while you may think the outcome is obvious, it is clearly not obvious to the people who need to make that determination, because otherwise they wouldn't have taken the case in the first place.
No, they are exactly the same. Saying you pay a $640 fine if you don't have health insurance is exactly the same as saying everyone pays $640 in extra taxes, except people with health insurance who get the $640 exempted. Except using different words, that have the same meaning in causing precisely the same effect.
You're simply saying that the law has the same effect as a tax, which is true under normal circumstances. But that doesn't make it "exactly the same". If it were "exactly the same", Obama wouldn't have argued so strenuously that it wasn't a tax when the mandate was passed and avoided the constitutional issues (after all, they were raised before it was passed). But he knew full well that passing such a large tax increase would have been political suicide, which is why the law wasn't written as a tax.
The Constitution has a list of enumerated powers for the federal government. Laws should be written such that it is clear which of these powers they are based on, and shouldn't leave that up to the courts to guess.
Teach both evolution and creationism say 54% of Britons British Council poll finds UK adults overtake Americans in wanting science teaching in schools to include intelligent design
Over the past two decades, science literacy in the United States – an estimate of the share of adults who can follow complex science issues and maybe even render an informed opinion on them – has nearly tripled. But – and it’s a big but -- the proportion of people who fall into this category remains small. Just 28 percent. [...] The U.S. figure is slightly higher than that for Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. And it’s double the 2005 rate in the United Kingdom (and the collective rate for the European Union).
People like to trot out such statistics to show that Americans are less scientifically literate, but that's not true. When you test adults with actual scientific questions that require understanding, percentage of basic scientific literacy is low in both the US and Europe, but it is still about twice as high in the US than in Europe.
Europeans tend to mistake belief in the veracity of scientific results with scientific literacy. But believing in quantum mechanics doesn't make you literate in quantum physics. Believing that Shakespeare was a great author doesn't mean you know Shakespeare.
Both the US and Europe have a long ways to go until their populations are scientifically literate. But Europe has an uphill battle not only because people are even less scientifically literate, they don't even realize it.
Yes, Congress can levy taxes to pay for health care, and the US government can (and does) run health care programs if it wants to. No problem with either. But that's not what Obama's health care law does.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you serious? We have spacecraft in orbit around the sun, flying to Mars and out of the solar system. Earlier, we bounced radar off Venus, measured stellar parallaxes, deflection of light due to the sun's gravity, transits of Venus, precise observations of planetary motions, etc. There are literally millions of measurements that prove a heliocentric solar system, quantitatively consistent with Newton's laws, measuring straightforward physical quantities like distance and time. High school students can analyze and model most of these things quantitatively even with a pocket calculator.
No, you can't. You can do something on a tabletop that seems vaguely similar to the greenhouse effect, but is actually quite different. You can't even define what "global average temperatures" means with high school science, let along quantitatively related measurements to models.
Why does it have to be anything? It could simply be a nonsensical law that is in violation of the Constitution.
The law is a mandate with a penalty for non-compliance. The law isn't written as a tax deduction for some voluntary choice. Even if the two had the same effect, it's not just the effect that matters, it's the wording of the law. If you think the same effect can be achieved with a law written in terms of tax deduction, Congress can pass the law again with acceptable wording.
Furthermore, even if it's a "Pandora's box", the sky wouldn't fall, since any and all those other laws would take a long time to come to the supreme court, giving Congress plenty of time to pass an amendment or fix any problems in other ways.
Of course, I think ending the system of complicated deductions would be a good thing anyway, as would putting some stricter limits again on what the federal government can do.
It seems like you have serious gaps in your science education. Heliocentrism has been been around for more than 2000 years. And the experimental evidence for heliocentrism is overwhelming and understanding is literally high school math and physics.
Yes, you just illustrated my point: you don't want to teach science, you want teach a bunch of phrases that you have no idea what they actually mean. I'm not surprised: if you think heliocentrism is obscure and difficult, then obviously your view of science is that it is always mysterious and impenetrable.
But, in fact, planetary motions are high school science, while climatology is far more complex.
Cultivate the same "fuck you" attitude not just towards Bible thumpers, but also towards "progressives" and "socialists", who are misusing science and reason just as much as the Bible thumpers.
Many scientists have also been racist, or occultist, or all sorts of other -ists, that doesn't make those -isms rational or acceptable. In fact, scientists have no more trouble holding inconsistent beliefs in their heads as any other human being.
When it comes to the Christian God, proof of his existence or non-existence isn't the primary issue. The real issues are that the God described in the Bible is a reprehensible being, that parts of the morality and teleology preached by Christianity are offensive and immoral, and a lot of the writings and dogma are inconsistent and have obviously been manipulated and altered over time for political and economic purposes.
No, it should be a requirement that people who teach a scientific subject can explain the evidence for the prevailing theory, carry out experiments to test it, and use this to teach what science is all about. They should teach the scientific method and critical thinking. That is what science is about.
People who merely believe something without understanding the evidence for it have no business teaching science at all.
In order to understand climate change as a scientific subject, you need differential equations, statistics, thermodynamics, and computational modeling. Neither teachers nor students have anywhere near the necessary background. Not even the graph showing average global temperature increase is something that people in high school can generally understand how it was derived or what kind of statistics went into creating it. Anything you can teach about climate change in high school is going to be superficial and based on a political agenda.
That's completely different from evolution. People in high school have the necessary skills to understand evolution, what the evidence is, and how it works. They can even carry out experiments to demonstrate it happening and look at the raw data and understand how it leads to the conclusion that we're here because of evolution.
It's more than big enough to settle and support dozens of families and plantations. And the expeditions looking for Earhart haven't even come close to exploring it all.
The island is not that small, it has trees, shade, coconuts, lots of crabs, and a lagoon full of fish. It's probably a bit short of fresh water, but between coconuts, rain, and a simple solar still using a tarp, she should have been able to get by. And someone else seems to have been able to survive there by themselves for a few years.
There's nothing to hack; the Galaxy SII has USB host mode out of the box.
Sure it has been grown in the US. Opium use was very widespread (laudanum, paregoric) in the US in the 19th century, and it was legal. The opium used was produced from US farms, including in California and the tobacco states. It was legal to do so until the late 30's.
TV, that's like a rotary phone, right? Some weird 20th century tech that old people are fond of, right?
Thanks, but I'll pass on both Apple TV and DirecTV; I think they both are awful.
Opiates also grow naturally and have also been used medically for thousands of years.
Kittens don't come with warnings. Does that mean they are safe to huff?
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Kitten_huffing
Incidentally, just have a look at SuperPAC spending on candidates to see how ineffective that has been: SuperPACs together spent $60 million on Gingrich and Santorum, three times as much as on Romney, and what did it get them? Nothing.
The federal government should have the powers enumerated in the Constitution, no more. Reasoning like yours has been used to extend those powers arbitrarily and I think that should be stopped and reversed. That also seems to be the question SCOTUS is wrestling with. The fact that this has done before many times doesn't mean it isn't time to stop it. After all, it took more than a century to achieve racial equality under the law, and we still have not fully implemented the non-establishment clause.
No, I don't see it. I preferred Gore to Bush at the time, but a decision needed to be made, and the vote was close enough that they might as well have tossed a coin.
Money in politics is a problem, but your view that corporations corrupt our political process by spending vast amounts of money just completely misses reality. The way you put it, you make it sound like Coca Cola, Apple, and (even) Citigroup are spending billions of dollars to produce ads that then compel the mindless minions of American voters vote for the candidates they hand pick. That story is wrong on so many levels: corporations can spend money only on things related to their business or they get in trouble with their investors and the law, the corporate donations most big corporations make are fairly evenly split, most SuperPAC donations come from rich private individuals, American voters aren't mindless minions whose votes can be bought with slick ads, and some of the people complaining most loudly about corporate personhood (including Obama) have been among the worst offenders in handing over huge amounts of tax dollars to corporations.
In fact, Citizens United was about a bunch of rich private donors pooling their money through a "corporation" (Citizens United) in order to engage in anonymous free speech. "Corporate personhood" just means that this group of people has the same rights as any other group of people to do so. If you want to curtail that, the question is: what group of people do you think should have the right to engage in anonymous free speech? If I and a hundred friends want to pool our money and take out an anonymous attack ad on Obama or Romney, what legal form do you suggest we should use? That's not a rhetorical question: there may well be something wrong with the way we can do that right now, but revoking corporate personhood is not going to fix it, and it likely requires a constitutional amendment to fix.
Well, you better figure out how to have a meaningful conversation with people like me because there are a lot of us around: independent and Republican voters, the majority of SCOTUS, the Tea Party, Libertarians. And we do have a lot of common ground with you, since we see a lot of the same problems. We just think that your solutions are ineffective. So, do your homework and then come to the table with convincing and coherent arguments.
There's no intelligent life there, just "I Love Lucy" reruns and presidential campaign commercials.
Not at all.
That's not a tax, that's a penalty, and that's what the act calls it. So, PPACA has a mandate and a penalty for non-compliance. Where is the tax? If you think the federal government can do this, what exactly can't it do then? Or do you think that there should be no constitutional limits on federal powers anymore?
Like PPACA, BCRA was a badly written law that catered to superficial populist sentiments. And what supposedly "disastrous effects" are you specifically referring to?
PPACA says "either you buy this, or you pay this penalty". That is not a "head tax proportional to the population": the money people pay to a private insurer goes to a private company and is highly variable, and the penalty is paid only by a small fraction of the population. Arguably, it could be a tax if if were written as "you must pay this tax, but you can deduct from the tax anything you pay to a private insurer". Note that, already, that has potentially a different financial impact.
But dictionary and Wikipedia definitions really aren't important in a legal context; they can give you a general guideline but nothing more. A "tax" is something much more specific in a legal context. For example, the money I pay to a private insurer or the penalty aren't treated as a "tax" by other laws or treaties.
Furthermore, the Constitution doesn't grant Congress the right to tax people for any purpose whatsoever, it grants Congress the right to tax in order to raise money for specific purposes and under particular conditions. In particular, the taxing and spending clause was intended to allow the government to raise money, not to impose arbitrary regulations or punishments.
SCOTUS needs to determine whether PPACA is or is not a tax in the sense of US law, and it will likely draw up a list of criteria to determine that. If it passes that test, then it needs to determine whether it is the kind of tax that the federal government is empowered to impose. And while you may think the outcome is obvious, it is clearly not obvious to the people who need to make that determination, because otherwise they wouldn't have taken the case in the first place.
You're simply saying that the law has the same effect as a tax, which is true under normal circumstances. But that doesn't make it "exactly the same". If it were "exactly the same", Obama wouldn't have argued so strenuously that it wasn't a tax when the mandate was passed and avoided the constitutional issues (after all, they were raised before it was passed). But he knew full well that passing such a large tax increase would have been political suicide, which is why the law wasn't written as a tax.
The Constitution has a list of enumerated powers for the federal government. Laws should be written such that it is clear which of these powers they are based on, and shouldn't leave that up to the courts to guess.
Guardian:
Science News
People like to trot out such statistics to show that Americans are less scientifically literate, but that's not true. When you test adults with actual scientific questions that require understanding, percentage of basic scientific literacy is low in both the US and Europe, but it is still about twice as high in the US than in Europe.
Europeans tend to mistake belief in the veracity of scientific results with scientific literacy. But believing in quantum mechanics doesn't make you literate in quantum physics. Believing that Shakespeare was a great author doesn't mean you know Shakespeare.
Both the US and Europe have a long ways to go until their populations are scientifically literate. But Europe has an uphill battle not only because people are even less scientifically literate, they don't even realize it.
OpenCongress.org provides RSS feeds for anything you like:
http://www.opencongress.org/about/rss
Took about 10 seconds to Google.
Yes, Congress can levy taxes to pay for health care, and the US government can (and does) run health care programs if it wants to. No problem with either. But that's not what Obama's health care law does.