You might as well call for the government to remain neutral on the subject of religion, except when it comes to the religious views that you espouse.
I espoused no religious views. As for regulation, I have no problem with the telecom industry being unregulated--as long as they give back the subsidies, immediately pay back the govt-financed loans, give back the land taken by eminent domain for their profit, immediately cede all govt-protected monopolies, immediately give up the protection the govt provides for their licenses for spectrum/intellectual property/trademark/copyright, and so on. There should also be an assessment of the dollar value accrued to their companies over the decades, with a realistic payback plan. I hope they do well off the public teat, but the public shouldn't be expected to fund their for-profit venture and then be hold "hands off!" when the public wants it run for public benefit.
I'm fairly libertarian, but I'm slowly and grudgingly giving up the myths of our free market history. Businesses spend a vast amount of money just keeping others out of their market, preventing competition, or achieving vendor lock-in. We like to believe that everyone who got rich just made a better mousetrap, but a lot of the success we see was of a somewhat different nature.
So we can trust the government to decide which gender combinations constitute a marriage, to determine which plants I can smoke, or which dirty pictures I can look at, but it's going too far to expect the government to support an open, competitive marketplace? Libertarianism seems to show up at the oddest times.
Yes, but all this historical analysis, though accurate and insightful, misses the point. The USA makes fun of the French because the French didn't want us to go into Iraq. Germany, China, and Russia also opposed intervention, in fact most of the world opposed intervention on the grounds that Saddam was not an imminent danger to anyone.
But we can't/won't ridicule and mock Germany, China, or Russia, all for various reasons (money in the first 2 cases, and Russia is a bit touchy), and we can't thumb our noses openly at the whole world while we're building an ostensible "coalition" and gabbing about the will of the free world. So France gets to be the proxy for everyone else who opposed us.
But among the many lessons Iraq has given us, is that the cuts went too deep. We simply don't have enough personnel anymore, and the strain on the Reserves and National Guard is the result.
Bullshit. The purpose of the US military is national defense, not nation-building, and not an indefinite occupation of an entire country. We are using the military for things militaries aren't for. Hell, I don't even know what our objective is (do we have one yet?) but the DoD brass warned before we even went into Iraq that it was a bad idea, with a poorly-defined mission and open-ended committment. Clinton's military did what it was supposed to do--defeat someone (Saddam, in our case) in battle. Warships and planes drop bombs, not the magic blessings of sweet democracy.
You're right--I tried it with Safari, and it worked for me, too. I guess the problem is with Firefox. I didn't think of that, because I've been using Firefox on Windows and Linux witih no problems for years. Thanks for the tip.
Is that it doesn't (as far as I know) replicate my single favorite feature of OpenOffice. With OpenOffice, I can copy/paste text from a webpage into it, and the hyperlinks will still be intact. Print-to-pdf, even in OS X, doesn't send the hyperlink information, so that's no option--OpenOffice is the only solution I've found. I can save the page, but the ability to copy/paste the sections I want and keep the links intact, and then export to PDF, is simply awesome, and is the "killer feature" of OpenOffice for me. If I just want to write a document, I'll use Abiword or LaTeX.
When I copy/paste into Neooffice, I get just the plain text--no links are preserved. I looked through the options to try to figure it out, to no avail. Haven't opened up NeoOffice since then. If anyone knows a way to fix that problem, please tell me. You can even throw in some gratuitous "lame noob" insults if it makes you feel better.
On a side note, I really wish someone smarter than me (is that a big enough labor pool for you?) would write a print-to-pdf type program that keeps the hyperlinks intact. I don't know what mojo OpenOffice uses to preserve the hyperlinks from text copied to the clipboard, but there is no doubt a way to make a one-trick application that prints a section of html to pdf while keeping the hyperlinks intact. Yes, I'd pay for it. Any ideas?
My tattered copy of Lord Jim is not a tempting high-theft item. I left a paperback in the washateria last week, remembered it 2 days later, and it was there on the shelf, safe as can be. A shiny new $300, or even $100, or even $50, electronic book-reading thingy is going to be a high-theft item. Even thieves who don't know what it is will eye it, because they know that electronics=desirable.
Yes, I'd still buy one, and use it for technical books, reference books, stuff like that--assuming that battery life is very very good. I'd love to have one with an encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, unix books, and so on. But for novels and pleasure-reading, I'll stick to musty paper.
I'm picky as hell about books. I'm a self-identified literary snob. Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, the whole bit. I found the Harry Potter books slow going at times (everything prior to the first day of school, usually) but the fact is that I read them, one after the other. Partly it was to have some common ground with my kids, but frankly the books were good. There is plenty of overrated tripe on the shelf (the Left Behind series comes to mind) but Harry Potter isn't bad.
That's the salient question--what counts as garbage? HP Lovecraft was a pulp writer, but certain rarer editions of his go for over $100 on Ebay. That I don't want it may qualify it as garbage to me, but someone keeps buying Michael Jordan commemorative retrospectives and simular stuff. The Left Behind series, which is artistically horrible and even biblically unsound, sold a bajillion copies.
I personally like to hunt down hardback copies of books I like, even books I already own. A hardback set (with dustjackets intact) of the 1981 Random House edition of Proust might be garbage to some, because it isn't a first edition and isn't an investment, but I paid over twice what a new paperback set costs. Want a hardback edition of Finnegans Wake? How about a single-volume India-Paper edition of Shakespeare's works, with dustjacket? Hardback editions (Everyman's Library doesn't count) of all the Dostoevsky works translated by Pevear/Volokonsky? None of these are financially valuable, so they probably fall into the "garbage" category to anyone looking at books as a business, but as a reader, well, I love that stuff, and I'm willing to pay for it. I love sites like addall.com. There is still money in books, but small bookstores who expect to be able to charge cover price for new release bestsellers are going to falter.
Yes, just about all reference books can be electronic, so they can be searched quickly. You MAY still want a paper copy so you have static info--governments like to retroactively edit the past, you know. How many times have we changed the meaning of "unemployment" now?
But I'm skeptical that computers/electronics will take much of literature-reading from books. Books are cheap to the point of being disposable. I have books that I picked up used and I've had for 20 years--economically, they're worth nothing. But as far as the experience of reading, they beat my Macbook or the Palm Tungstem I used to have. I have read a couple of long books on a Palm, and even with a good screen it still isn't that great. The battery life, fragility, cost factor, all affect your experience. If I leave a book on a train I'm out $20 (sometimes a lot less, down to less than $1 for used books), and I've lost just one book. If I'd lost my Tungsten I'd be out $350, and even with all my ebooks backed up and in non-DRM formats so I could easily replace them, it still takes work and time to get another unit and upload all the software and files.
I love tech as much as the next guy. But old-fashioned books are not going to go away with just a few more technological advances. I just moved into a new house, and no, I didn't like unpacking ~2K books, but a thumbdrive full of pdfs isn't a good enough replacement, no matter how good the screen or how long the battery life.
Now, music and movies, yes--to me, music cds are just wasted space, and I don't feel much differently about movie dvds. I'd much prefer a HD full of mp3s (or ogg files, whatever) to a large CD collection.
Unless the omnipotent being is just a projection of yourself, along with all your vanity, megalomania, narrow-mindedness, and judgemental nature writ large and freed from the restraints suffered by fininte beings. That might explain the existence of hell, that you only get saved from it by worshiping that one god, and so forth. In other words, just about everything in the bible other than the Sermon on the Mount--meaning all that about 75% of Christians dwell so lovingly on.
The first paragraph of your post looks like it was written by someone in complete ignorance in the thousands-of-years-old role of church-based religion in fomenting discord, prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Yes, there were abolotionist Christians, and many Christians who wanted to preserve slavery, as well. Even today, how many Evangelicals think that torture is okay, and that the best way to help the poor is to do nothing for them, lest you undermine their initiative?
Macroevolution is speciation, and speciation has been observed repeatedly, in the lab and in the wild. The distinction is about as important as the distinction between microwalking, i.e., walking short distances, and macrowalking, walking long distances. Skeptics of macroevolution are basically asking me to believe that large numbers of small changes don't add up to large changes. Change is change, and the difference is one of degree, not quality.
Yes, we do have a rather strong strain of fundamentalist Christianity in the USA. Straight-out young-earth Creationism is fairly common.
You're partially right, in that no one really believes in intelligent design. ID exists only because it was designed to get around the Supreme Court's rejection of teaching Creationism in classrooms. In the Dover case, and others I've read about, the people who tried to push ID into the classroom were doing it for purely religious reasons. It's just rebranded Creationism.
What does a pluralistic society do with those who do not believe in the values that allow a pluralistic society to exist? This question has been bugging me for a few months,since I read Kingdom Coming, The Rise of Christian Nationalism. The argument applies equally well to fundamentalists from any religion. They basically do not believe in a pluralistic society. Tolerance is not considered a virtue. Rationality is not considered a virtue.
Faith, obedience to God (or whatever the leader says that God meant, truth be told) and adherence to the group's internal norms are the only virtues. They hate a free, tolerant society for the very values and qualities that we love it for. But we can't very well shoot them all, because, well, that isn't very nice. But what do we do with them? They will continually try to co-opt, undermine, and degrade the freedom we care about.
And it isn't just freedom that suffers--intellectual integrity goes out the window as we try to accomodate them. Evolution is the foundation of modern biology, but how many teachers have to tiptoe around it, along with the age of the Earth and who knows how many other subjects, because they might "offend" a subset of the religious among them? And now we're editing one of the most central facts of the 20th century out of existence because of yet more religious fundamentalists. Fantastic.
I say teach it all, including intelligent design and holocaust history and let the student sort it out.
We should teach that the holocaust both did and did not happen? How do you "teach" mutually exclusive conclusions? Or are you just being completely relativistic and concluding that all viewpoints have equal validity?
I'm still unclear on how one would teach ID. ID posits nothing more substantial than "there are things that evolution can't explain." I guess you could go down the list of things ID proponents tell us can't evolve without a designer, and then go on to cover the extensive literature explaining how those very things could evolve without a designer. Of course that wouldn't be teaching ID--that would be refuting crackpot pseudoscience by pointing out that its claims are factually wrong.
I've come across quite a few people who said they wanted ID "taught" in the schools, but from what I could tell all they wanted to do was say "Evolution is bunk!" and then keep from the kids all the literature that explains the things they (the ID fans) claim are unexplainable. I'm not sure how you can use the word "teach" in that context without your pants bursting into flame.
Military retirement is currently capped at 75% of base pay, and that's after serving 30 years. You get 50% at 20 years of service, and that increases by 2.5% for every year you serve over 20. But the money is still good. Benefits of an all-volunteer, i.e. mercenary, force. If the USA would go to a "national service" model, where everyone has to serve (other than the sons/daughters of the rich, natch), then they could slash the gravy train and pay people a sustenance wage. But that isn't politically viable at the moment.
Well, I got away with plenty through reasoning, though nothing that bad. It wasn't as if I burned down the house or smuggled arms and then lawyered my way out of it. But a byproduct is that I'm now a very logical person who can present my case persuasively, and evaluate the logical value of others' arguments.
I encourage the same in my kids, despite the price in added argumentation. They don't get away with anything major, but if they can present a logical, structured argument then they sometimes get a pass. They're also more likely to get what they want if they can present a case for it--saying "but I waaaaant it! Everyone else gets it! That's not faaaaiiiir!" will guarantee that they won't get it, but presenting a case will increase the odds dramatically of getting what they want.
It's not that I want to raise lawyers, but that I value the ability to present oneself logically. I know far too many adults (almost all, that is) who can't present a case for even the most obvious things. My kids will reach adulthood having gotten away with some trivial things and received a few more toys than they might've otherwise, but they'll whine less and be able to explain themselves like grownups when asked something.
I sincerely feel that parents who don't let their kids reason their way out of anything are raising future adults who won't be able to explain themselves intelligently. All parents are susceptible to something, and if it isn't reasoning, it might well be whining, complaining, crying, tantrum-throwing, or pouting. I'd rather have a soft spot for a well-presented argument than for constant whining.
You know what? As a kid, if I did something stupid, my parents spanked me. Guess what? I usually didn't do the same stupid thing twice.
Not all of us learned the same lessons. I learned to lie better, to plan better, and I knew about plausible deniability long before I knew the term. From as early as I remember, I felt that I was getting in trouble for getting caught. This lesson was not lost upon me.
Yes, but I don't think quantum mechanics is based on just "Well, I don't see a pattern. Do you see a pattern? Then we're decided--it's random." Science is always provisional, but the best science we have right now tells us (as far as I understand, which is always a relevant caveat) that there is a random element at a particular subatomic level. What effect does that have on the macro world that you and I operate in? I have no idea.
My (limited) understanding of chaos theory is it's not only the initial conditions that throw things off, but that inputs have a nonlinear effect on the output. Like the old saying goes, a butterfly flapping its wings in China could cause thunderstorms in NY, or something like that. The way I think of it, a guy turning on his porch light heats the air, which influences circulation and air rising, and we don't know where that effect ends up. It's unpredictable, even if we do have all the initial data.
I wasn't meaning to say that our free will relies on quantum effects, though I guess that's what I ended up saying. I meant that determinism itself, in regards to all matter, falls apart if we take quantum effects into account. We never know everything, because things aren't static and our idea of reality is largely an artifact of the combination of our intelligence and our limitations.
Our brains are made of matter, so presumably it plays out somewhere in there, but I guess my real point is that, even if nature is at its base deterministic, which I doubt, for our purposes it doesn't matter because we can never have enough data to predict anything at this level, and for all practical purposes we might as well act as if we have free will.
We can argue about whether or not we REALLY REALLY have free will, but as I wrote earlier, I think this debate only exists in relation to us and is meaningless when it goes beyond the scope of our subset of reality. If we, for all intents and purposes, have what amounts to free will, even if only because of our limited natures and what data is available, then we pretty much have free will.
If however you adopt certain other positions regarding the state of reality you can easily, and consistently arrive at determinism within an atheistic world view
But wouldn't quantum effects undermine any certainty? Even if we knew every particle's position and charge and so on (I'm over my head here in describing the physics), there is still an element, however slight, of randomness. Or at least that's my understanding. It's why (along with chaos theory) we could never predict the weather, no matter how much data about the present state we have. As I said, I'm an atheist, and I'm not positing a mystical life-force or soul, only saying that there is some level past which we can't predict things, and those effects cumulatively mean that we can't predict things at our level, not to the extent that we could ever predict every decision made by people. I'm a complete layman here, and I'd love for someone with more understanding of the physics to step in here and clarify.
I'm an atheist, and I think the question of determinism is unknowable. Even if it is in principle knowable, the sum total of all knowledge about everything is unknowable by us, which means that, for all practical purposes, we might as well have free will. We're running up against the limits of human knowledge, and (to me) philosophy should focus on what reality is for us, not some purely abstract "what it really is" question. Our meaning is made by us. Yes, I'm a rabid existentialist. Mathematics (for one example) may describe an independly extant reality, and that's great, but the question of free will exists only in relation to us. Math would exist (theoretically) if all sentient life died, but free will depends on sentience.
Plus, the stock market is essentially dependent on people's impulses. There is no inherent trend in the numbers, because there is no inherent value in the stock--it's all about the "bigger sucker" that may buy for a higher price than you did. Computer models for scientific data, whether it be global warming or background radiation, are working with data that has some consistency, even if that consistency is randomness.
This information is available everywhere. Drive less. If you must drive, buy a more fuel-efficient vehicle. Carpool. Buy less stuff. Turn your thermostat up (or down) a bit. Replace your incandescent bulbs with compact flourescents.
This information is ubiquitous, but it gets ignored because your average person (not just Joe Sixpack, but people across all socioeconomic backgrounds) doesn't hate just draconian changes, but any changes. They resent being told that they consume too much stuff, drive a gas guzzler, and so on, and this resentment is behind much of the "skepticism" about global warming. No one wants change. And we won't change, because there won't be a sudden oh-my-god moment like there is in the movies.
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I'm fairly libertarian, but I'm slowly and grudgingly giving up the myths of our free market history. Businesses spend a vast amount of money just keeping others out of their market, preventing competition, or achieving vendor lock-in. We like to believe that everyone who got rich just made a better mousetrap, but a lot of the success we see was of a somewhat different nature.
So we can trust the government to decide which gender combinations constitute a marriage, to determine which plants I can smoke, or which dirty pictures I can look at, but it's going too far to expect the government to support an open, competitive marketplace? Libertarianism seems to show up at the oddest times.
But we can't/won't ridicule and mock Germany, China, or Russia, all for various reasons (money in the first 2 cases, and Russia is a bit touchy), and we can't thumb our noses openly at the whole world while we're building an ostensible "coalition" and gabbing about the will of the free world. So France gets to be the proxy for everyone else who opposed us.
You're right--I tried it with Safari, and it worked for me, too. I guess the problem is with Firefox. I didn't think of that, because I've been using Firefox on Windows and Linux witih no problems for years. Thanks for the tip.
When I copy/paste into Neooffice, I get just the plain text--no links are preserved. I looked through the options to try to figure it out, to no avail. Haven't opened up NeoOffice since then. If anyone knows a way to fix that problem, please tell me. You can even throw in some gratuitous "lame noob" insults if it makes you feel better.
On a side note, I really wish someone smarter than me (is that a big enough labor pool for you?) would write a print-to-pdf type program that keeps the hyperlinks intact. I don't know what mojo OpenOffice uses to preserve the hyperlinks from text copied to the clipboard, but there is no doubt a way to make a one-trick application that prints a section of html to pdf while keeping the hyperlinks intact. Yes, I'd pay for it. Any ideas?
Yes, I'd still buy one, and use it for technical books, reference books, stuff like that--assuming that battery life is very very good. I'd love to have one with an encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, unix books, and so on. But for novels and pleasure-reading, I'll stick to musty paper.
I'm picky as hell about books. I'm a self-identified literary snob. Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, the whole bit. I found the Harry Potter books slow going at times (everything prior to the first day of school, usually) but the fact is that I read them, one after the other. Partly it was to have some common ground with my kids, but frankly the books were good. There is plenty of overrated tripe on the shelf (the Left Behind series comes to mind) but Harry Potter isn't bad.
I personally like to hunt down hardback copies of books I like, even books I already own. A hardback set (with dustjackets intact) of the 1981 Random House edition of Proust might be garbage to some, because it isn't a first edition and isn't an investment, but I paid over twice what a new paperback set costs. Want a hardback edition of Finnegans Wake? How about a single-volume India-Paper edition of Shakespeare's works, with dustjacket? Hardback editions (Everyman's Library doesn't count) of all the Dostoevsky works translated by Pevear/Volokonsky? None of these are financially valuable, so they probably fall into the "garbage" category to anyone looking at books as a business, but as a reader, well, I love that stuff, and I'm willing to pay for it. I love sites like addall.com. There is still money in books, but small bookstores who expect to be able to charge cover price for new release bestsellers are going to falter.
But I'm skeptical that computers/electronics will take much of literature-reading from books. Books are cheap to the point of being disposable. I have books that I picked up used and I've had for 20 years--economically, they're worth nothing. But as far as the experience of reading, they beat my Macbook or the Palm Tungstem I used to have. I have read a couple of long books on a Palm, and even with a good screen it still isn't that great. The battery life, fragility, cost factor, all affect your experience. If I leave a book on a train I'm out $20 (sometimes a lot less, down to less than $1 for used books), and I've lost just one book. If I'd lost my Tungsten I'd be out $350, and even with all my ebooks backed up and in non-DRM formats so I could easily replace them, it still takes work and time to get another unit and upload all the software and files.
I love tech as much as the next guy. But old-fashioned books are not going to go away with just a few more technological advances. I just moved into a new house, and no, I didn't like unpacking ~2K books, but a thumbdrive full of pdfs isn't a good enough replacement, no matter how good the screen or how long the battery life.
Now, music and movies, yes--to me, music cds are just wasted space, and I don't feel much differently about movie dvds. I'd much prefer a HD full of mp3s (or ogg files, whatever) to a large CD collection.
Unless the omnipotent being is just a projection of yourself, along with all your vanity, megalomania, narrow-mindedness, and judgemental nature writ large and freed from the restraints suffered by fininte beings. That might explain the existence of hell, that you only get saved from it by worshiping that one god, and so forth. In other words, just about everything in the bible other than the Sermon on the Mount--meaning all that about 75% of Christians dwell so lovingly on.
The first paragraph of your post looks like it was written by someone in complete ignorance in the thousands-of-years-old role of church-based religion in fomenting discord, prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry. Yes, there were abolotionist Christians, and many Christians who wanted to preserve slavery, as well. Even today, how many Evangelicals think that torture is okay, and that the best way to help the poor is to do nothing for them, lest you undermine their initiative?
Macroevolution is speciation, and speciation has been observed repeatedly, in the lab and in the wild. The distinction is about as important as the distinction between microwalking, i.e., walking short distances, and macrowalking, walking long distances. Skeptics of macroevolution are basically asking me to believe that large numbers of small changes don't add up to large changes. Change is change, and the difference is one of degree, not quality.
You're partially right, in that no one really believes in intelligent design. ID exists only because it was designed to get around the Supreme Court's rejection of teaching Creationism in classrooms. In the Dover case, and others I've read about, the people who tried to push ID into the classroom were doing it for purely religious reasons. It's just rebranded Creationism.
Faith, obedience to God (or whatever the leader says that God meant, truth be told) and adherence to the group's internal norms are the only virtues. They hate a free, tolerant society for the very values and qualities that we love it for. But we can't very well shoot them all, because, well, that isn't very nice. But what do we do with them? They will continually try to co-opt, undermine, and degrade the freedom we care about.
And it isn't just freedom that suffers--intellectual integrity goes out the window as we try to accomodate them. Evolution is the foundation of modern biology, but how many teachers have to tiptoe around it, along with the age of the Earth and who knows how many other subjects, because they might "offend" a subset of the religious among them? And now we're editing one of the most central facts of the 20th century out of existence because of yet more religious fundamentalists. Fantastic.
I'm still unclear on how one would teach ID. ID posits nothing more substantial than "there are things that evolution can't explain." I guess you could go down the list of things ID proponents tell us can't evolve without a designer, and then go on to cover the extensive literature explaining how those very things could evolve without a designer. Of course that wouldn't be teaching ID--that would be refuting crackpot pseudoscience by pointing out that its claims are factually wrong.
I've come across quite a few people who said they wanted ID "taught" in the schools, but from what I could tell all they wanted to do was say "Evolution is bunk!" and then keep from the kids all the literature that explains the things they (the ID fans) claim are unexplainable. I'm not sure how you can use the word "teach" in that context without your pants bursting into flame.
Military retirement is currently capped at 75% of base pay, and that's after serving 30 years. You get 50% at 20 years of service, and that increases by 2.5% for every year you serve over 20. But the money is still good. Benefits of an all-volunteer, i.e. mercenary, force. If the USA would go to a "national service" model, where everyone has to serve (other than the sons/daughters of the rich, natch), then they could slash the gravy train and pay people a sustenance wage. But that isn't politically viable at the moment.
I encourage the same in my kids, despite the price in added argumentation. They don't get away with anything major, but if they can present a logical, structured argument then they sometimes get a pass. They're also more likely to get what they want if they can present a case for it--saying "but I waaaaant it! Everyone else gets it! That's not faaaaiiiir!" will guarantee that they won't get it, but presenting a case will increase the odds dramatically of getting what they want.
It's not that I want to raise lawyers, but that I value the ability to present oneself logically. I know far too many adults (almost all, that is) who can't present a case for even the most obvious things. My kids will reach adulthood having gotten away with some trivial things and received a few more toys than they might've otherwise, but they'll whine less and be able to explain themselves like grownups when asked something.
I sincerely feel that parents who don't let their kids reason their way out of anything are raising future adults who won't be able to explain themselves intelligently. All parents are susceptible to something, and if it isn't reasoning, it might well be whining, complaining, crying, tantrum-throwing, or pouting. I'd rather have a soft spot for a well-presented argument than for constant whining.
Yes, but I don't think quantum mechanics is based on just "Well, I don't see a pattern. Do you see a pattern? Then we're decided--it's random." Science is always provisional, but the best science we have right now tells us (as far as I understand, which is always a relevant caveat) that there is a random element at a particular subatomic level. What effect does that have on the macro world that you and I operate in? I have no idea.
I wasn't meaning to say that our free will relies on quantum effects, though I guess that's what I ended up saying. I meant that determinism itself, in regards to all matter, falls apart if we take quantum effects into account. We never know everything, because things aren't static and our idea of reality is largely an artifact of the combination of our intelligence and our limitations.
Our brains are made of matter, so presumably it plays out somewhere in there, but I guess my real point is that, even if nature is at its base deterministic, which I doubt, for our purposes it doesn't matter because we can never have enough data to predict anything at this level, and for all practical purposes we might as well act as if we have free will.
We can argue about whether or not we REALLY REALLY have free will, but as I wrote earlier, I think this debate only exists in relation to us and is meaningless when it goes beyond the scope of our subset of reality. If we, for all intents and purposes, have what amounts to free will, even if only because of our limited natures and what data is available, then we pretty much have free will.
I'm an atheist, and I think the question of determinism is unknowable. Even if it is in principle knowable, the sum total of all knowledge about everything is unknowable by us, which means that, for all practical purposes, we might as well have free will. We're running up against the limits of human knowledge, and (to me) philosophy should focus on what reality is for us, not some purely abstract "what it really is" question. Our meaning is made by us. Yes, I'm a rabid existentialist. Mathematics (for one example) may describe an independly extant reality, and that's great, but the question of free will exists only in relation to us. Math would exist (theoretically) if all sentient life died, but free will depends on sentience.
Plus, the stock market is essentially dependent on people's impulses. There is no inherent trend in the numbers, because there is no inherent value in the stock--it's all about the "bigger sucker" that may buy for a higher price than you did. Computer models for scientific data, whether it be global warming or background radiation, are working with data that has some consistency, even if that consistency is randomness.
This information is ubiquitous, but it gets ignored because your average person (not just Joe Sixpack, but people across all socioeconomic backgrounds) doesn't hate just draconian changes, but any changes. They resent being told that they consume too much stuff, drive a gas guzzler, and so on, and this resentment is behind much of the "skepticism" about global warming. No one wants change. And we won't change, because there won't be a sudden oh-my-god moment like there is in the movies.