Not drilling is mostly what we have been doing. There are lots of wells being drilled and operating in the Gulf of Mexico, but only a small proportion of those are for or by US companies. The reason they had to go out so far that they no longer have proven solutions is because of the NIMBY crowd pushing them farther and farther away from shore.
Let them drill where they know how to fix things when they go wrong, and they can fix things when they go wrong, the only problem is, you no longer have a horizon free of oil wells.
When Texas joined the Union, we kept control of our coastal waters, so we have lots of relatively safe off-shore wells, other states just protest the national government when they decide that the coast of state X might be an ok place to look for oil.
Just like the off-shore wind farm that has been going through so many regulatory hurdles off the coast of Florida(?), Texas sent that company a letter stating: when you are done having fun with red tape, come build one of those off our shores.
Perhaps the reduced regulatory oversight is one of the reasons Texas does not seem to be participating much in this little recession the rest of the country is dealing with...
Those laws say that your kid cannot buy those things, there is no law saying you cannot give alcohol to your kid that I know of. There may be CPS issues with giving cigarettes to your kid depending on where you live, but some places it is probably legal to give those to your kid as well.
I remember one time when I was a kid my dad let me have a taste of his beer(Pat Blue-ribbon I think), and while I doubt it is the only reason, I suspect it may be part of the reason I still do not like alcohol(now over 30).
Last I heard parents are the only ones allowed to give alcohol to a minor, but they are still allowed to do so.
Just to be clear, I personally live primarily in a society where everyone below the arbitrary age of 18 is a Precious Little Snowflake(tm), and would not particularly mind seeing anyone who has had sex with a prepubescent anything be strung up by their genitalia. But that is my society, not theirs.
In the Catholic Church, Everyone is a Precious Little Snowflake(tm) and if you make a mistake, you can just say you are sorry and it is all better. (just make sure you really are sorry or the omnipotent hyper-dimensional being who could prevent you from ever being born, will not like it)
And for those who ask 'Why does God let bad things happen to good people?' the answer is Free Will. Go back far enough and just abut every bad thing is the result of a choice someone made. Even most natural disasters would not affect people if there were not people choosing to live where those events occur. No one can learn if they are shielded from the results of their choices, even when those results are harm to other people.
There is a step that everyone seems to be skipping. Do you really believe that a priest who has been accused of Pedophilia is just pulled form one parish and put directly into another parish?
I rather expect that every one of them is given the choice: leave the church or go to confession and probably some training.
Now, punishment is a little constrained because once someone has made a sincere confession and done their penance, the sin/crime is no more. This is the same standard that every other member of the church is held to, from the Pope to the guy who only attends mass on Easter and Christmas. Since this whole 'forgiveness' thing is one of the the central tenants of the church, that is what they do for anyone who displays remorse for their actions.
Now, let us say that a criminal who has served their time in jail and has been released as no-longer a threat to society, wants to move to small-town USA and make a fresh start. Is it easier if they broadcast their previous transgressions, or harder? In the Eyes of the State, they are no longer a threat(excepting some specific crimes that are treated differently).
Try looking at the church as it's own country, in a Muslim country, if a woman is raped, then her family must kill her for the dishonor. Should the US then send all of it's rape victims to a Muslim nation for proper justice, or is US justice good enough for US citizens? The same with philandering, if you have an adulterer in the US, then their spouse has cause for divorce and keeping most if not all of the communal property, other places the punishments are more harsh.
The priests have been punished by the laws of their society, those laws may be more lenient than other societies would prefer, but so long as they are applied consistently within that society, how is it reasonable for other societies to claim that their society is broken?
This is just another case where anything different is bad because it is not the way *I* think it should be.
People can't live their lives if they're being aborted.
You're not a person until you can live without being attached to an umbilical cord. Until then you're a parasite.
So if someone is a person depends solely upon the technology available in the area where their parents live?
That is an attribute completely outside of the potential person.
Your argument implies that what would not have been a person 100 years ago is a person now, and that if a pregnant mother were to go on a missionary trip where nothing beyond basic first-aid is available, her unborn might go from being a person to being a parasite.
Every day the latest possible implantation and the earliest possible retrieval get closer and closer together. Will a fertilized egg only become a person to you when the entire process can be conducted without a human body around besides the one growing from the egg?
I have no doubt we will get there, and I see no intrinsic difference between those that are currently gestating and those that will be gestating once that technology is available.
The subsidy's decrease smoothly enough with income so that the marginal return to money is almost always positive. So it would never make economic sense to make less money in order to make it back in health-care benefits. Seems like a big improvement...
Only if you take this bill as a stand alone. On the other hand, if you add in the sloping costs of other government subsidies(housing assistance, food stamps, and all of those other 'help the poor' subsidies of which there are several if you know how to work the system, or get help to do so), this just makes the already steep ramp off of the government dole even steeper. Not a lot steeper perhaps, but that does not matter much since if they are all put together costs already increase at a pace much more rapid than the increase of income.
So yes, in an airless, frictionless environment this ramp will not make the climb too steep. In the real world however, this ramp is put on an already steep slope and the whole thing is regularly sprayed down with random patches of grease and glue.
If you refuse to tolerate the intolerant, you will not have an opportunity to understand their point of view and gain their trust to the point of helping them overcome their intolerance.
If the intolerant are sequestered away from those who are otherwise tolerant, then they will not have an opportunity to understand why they should be tolerant, instead their intolerance will be reinforced by seeing how they are scorned by those who claim to be better by being more tolerant.
You would not invite them to activities where they would be uncomfortable, just as you would not pester an acrophobe to attend a wedding in a chapel at the top of a high-rise, or a demophobe to attend a large rally.
Let's say that 80, or even 95% of people are 'good' as in they would not hurt their fellow man to further their own interests.
That gives you that one in 20 people who would be happy to slit your throat because he wants to add your wife to his harem.
At that point you have a number of choices. And until you get everyone else to agree as to what exactly should be dun about the murderer in their midsts, you can't really move forward.
Lots of people have difficulty believing that someone they know is capable of doing terrible things. Add in the opportunity for that evil person to persuade those he knows to be gullible, and he can paralyze most of the community with indecision.
On the other hand, if there is an invisible man living in the sky that says 'if an evil person does X, they must be punished by Y' then you have a set of laws that everyone feels they must follow, even if they don't like doing what they are told to do.
If you only have a set of laws, then people will ignore them if they have had an argument with that authority, unless that authority has the power to back-up their decrees.
Back before there was any real law, religion demanded 'en eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth' This was very harsh by our standards, but before that, vengeance and feuding would wipe out an entire family for an imagined slight.
The religions that survive generally do so because they strengthen the society they are introduced into. If they weakened the society that founded them, then the religion would be wiped out with that people. (think about the middle Americans, like the Aztecs)
Even now, there are lots of poorly educated people who don't believe they would get caught for committing crimes, but they know that there is that invisible man up there who WILL see them and get them for it in the end, so they don't murder their neighbors for his new shoes. (ever notice how many ex-gang members get out of the gang by finding god?)
Religion can, did, and still does support civilization.
We cannot become a truly dystopian society so long as religion still holds a strong sway. (we are slowly becoming more dystopian because religion is losing it's hold, but tragedies like 9/11 help push the pendulum back the other way)
Hmm, 108 matches in the US 10 in my state 2 regarding places I actually have family. My mother is a male in his 20's (Jacky is a very male name, obviously)
And apparently I only paid about 1/3 the value of my house...
Within a few millennia we'd be back into a deep ice age. (Slowly, mainly from vulcanism, the CO2 will be replaced in the atmosphere and, with the right orbital forcings, eventually the planet would escape from the ice age again)
Tim.
I think you mean Glacial period and inter-glacial period. We are currently in an ice-age(you can tell because we have ice-caps that stay there all year)
I imagine it's the same level of contribution that frivolous lawsuits add - nearly 2%!
And when they can afford health care, doctors maximize useless services and tests to push up profits, even when they are duplicative or entirely unnecessary.
That is not for pushing up profits, that is called 'defensive medicine' where doctors must give hypochondriacs every test they request or else risk a malpractice suit with ruinous damages. So that 300% increase in costs from unneeded tests is actually an indirect part of the costs of frivolous lawsuits. I doubt that '2%' even includes malpractice insurance.
Example: I was a blood donor for many years and at one point got a false positive on one of the many many screening tests that they are required to do. I went to a hematologist about this positive test result and was told point-blank that I did not have this condition as I had not ever been outside the US and this condition is only present in a small numbers in a few third-world countries. I asked for the test anyway, and they gave it to me, confirming what the hematologist said from the start.
There might be a little less of that 'anti-intellect bias' if the self-proclaimed intellectuals did not spend so much time looking down their noses at those who prefer learning practical skills as opposed to esoteric ones, and stop considering everyone who chooses physical labor as ignorant. Painting them as racists does not help much either.
For example, I know one lady who has a part-time job taking care of plants at home depot. She also works in the Anthropology department of the State University and is pursuing a graduate degree in forensic anthropology. But many of people who see her taking care of the plants at home Depot probably think she is just some ignorant farmer...
My sister has a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Spent a tour of duty in the Air force working on the next generation cruise missile, and now is a farrier and farmer.
If you look past those labels you have pasted on them, you might find you have much more in common that you ever thought...
The US is only footing 22% of the bills of the UN? I always thought it was more than that(more along the lines of a majority).
I suppose it is not surprising that the only other country with a double digit contribution is Japan(16%).
Then again, it looks like this is just the operations budget, so does not include things like the troops provided for the various police actions that the UN is so often involved in. (and that generally seems to be so dominated by the US that they are often called US wars, even though we never seem to annex any of those places we have 'conquered,' unlike the Russians, Germans, or just about anyone else that has ever been involved in wars in Europe or Asia)
Those sections you quoted look more like 'those nasty capitalists are getting more successes at promoting what we want than we communists are with our protest signs' and 'If we do not all help the eco-capitalists then we will all die'
Neither one claims that Communism is wrong, but only that other methods seem to work better. Also, I would point out that Rush Limbaugh(and I have no doubt others as well) have repeatedly pointed out that many of those old Communists are now using the Environmentalism movement to achieve their earlier Communist aims.
Put those together and I have difficulty seeing any evidence that this fellow is NOT a communist.
Also, according to both Wikipedia and Marriam-Webster a lie is an attempt to deceive.
So if the speaker is stating something that they truly believe, then it is not a lie, because there is no attempt to deceive, it is an attempt to inform using facts that may or may not match reality.
Just as telling an Atheist that "Jesus died for Your sins!" is not a lie if the speaker believes what they are saying.
Now, if this fellow were to publicly denounce Communism, that would be a different story, but identifying new means to achieve the same old aims seems like a pretty suspicious conversion to me...
Hmm, looks like this Glen Beck is not on my local radio. Could be the reason I had no idea who he was.
Don't forget another possibility: Not the most accurate model available, but both simple enough and accurate enough to be useful for the application at hand.
Newtonian models of gravity are still used for most (all?)space exploration. Sure it does not cover Frame Dragging, but the error bar between Newtonian gravity and general relativity is small enough in most cases that it is not worth the additional effort of using the greater complexity of general relativity instead.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
Things that stir the soul of one culture need not make any sense to any other culture.
Other than having a professional demeanor while at work, I see no reason that a person would need to be a social chameleon. Sure you may dress up when you go to a costume party, or quiet down when attending church, but in general, one should be able to be oneself at all times.
My friends, family, and coworkers could all easily distinguish activities I probably have engaged in from ones I probably would not engage in if given a list, and those will generally all match up very well(not counting the lists from a current or former girlfriend, but those things are private between the participants and need not be shared)
Then again, I suppose not everyone has the foresight to select and train for a career they actually enjoy, and so must put on a mask every day lest their coworkers see the quiet desperation in their eyes as they try to 'make do'
And I suppose that many are not confident in and of themselves so that they feel they must wear a mask to get people to like them, a mask that they must then wear any time they are around their 'friends' who are not really their friends, but friends of the mask that they wear.
Just considering those two situations is depressing enough, I don't even want to consider a person that feels a need to wear a mask around their own family.
Apparently not everyone is up to date. It is no longer called Global Warming.(or even anthropogenic global warming) Since the global average temperatures have been going down for the last 10 years(or was that 11, I forget), it is now called Climate Change. (Just like what happened with 'Global Cooling' becoming 'Global Warming')
All these name changes seem to be fairly similar to how the creationists renamed their issue to be 'Intelligent Design' when people were no longer swallowing it...
I personally would consider anthropogenic climate change to be much more believable if they stopped needing to completely re-work their theories every time we have collected enough new climate data to demonstrate that their models are more assumption and fear-mongering than fact.
There are three things that any credible researcher in any other field would need to provide for peer review before any 'earth shattering' discoveries will be believed: * Present your source data in an easily examined fashion so that everyone can see if you did cherry picking. * Publish your models/analysis technique so that others can examine your assumptions and how you reached your conclusions. * Have some other lab(s) produce reinforcing results when they test your models/data along with any new data that has become available since you presented it in a completed form.
This was needed to confirm Element 114 was produced, so why require less when talking about something that requires economic changes on a global scale?
This year we were supposed to have the worst season of hurricanes on record. Instead it was one of the lightest.
Just give me SOME form of proof that this is not just a bunch of political BS. And no, a consensus is not science. The consensus was that the speed of light was variable until Einstein showed differently. Before that the consensus was that light traveled through the Ether between the planets.
Give me repeatable experiments and models that continue to work for more than 6 months. Anything less is politics and scaremongering.
Here is a problem: Humans are inherently sexual beings. The survival of the species demands every calory of energy that is not being spent on basic survival(and no few that are) be spent on procreation. That is the first, last, and only goal of our genes: survive into the next generation, then the next, then the next, and so on. Anything that interferes with that will eventually be crowded out by those that do not have that interfering behaviour.
Now, humans have developed a civilization so that survival is not nearly the challenge that it once was, and we have much more available energy to spend on things beyond survival and procreation. The problem is, we still have the same drives, impulses, and needs that our primitive ancestors had. We can sublimate and subvert those to a limited extent, but we are fighting against millions of years of evolution for every step we take, and if we are successful, then those abilities/techniques will die out or become rare because those without those abilities/techniques will out-breed those with them.
Society, for the most part, has managed to put some reasonable restrictions on procreation(no close relatives, children below the age of consent, people married to someone else, boss/subordinate, etc.) but outside of those constraints(and some times even within them), a majority of interaction between a person and those people with the appropriate gender, is all about finding out if the person you are speculating about will indeed have sex with you.
That is the way people are wired and we do not have the ability to change this in any significant way.
Any time you join a large group with a vast majority of them desiring a member of your gender/sexuality/hair-style/whatever for their sexual partner, you WILL get propositioned. Even worse, the clumsy/desperate/clueless/less desirable ones will usually predominate(because the 'good' ones have an easier time finding mates).
Then, let's make the gender of those desiring you the one that is more aggressive in seeking procreation. And, just for kicks, let's make the archetype of the group someone who has a drastically reduced chance of procreating for some reason(social inexperience, shyness, reduced expression of primal sexual desirability traits, etc), and you could be Jabba-the-hut in a dress and get propositioned.
If you want to interact with humans, there are certain facts you will just need to get used to. Some guys in any group of sufficient size will sniff around any female like a male dog checking to see if a bitch is in heat. Even worse, many of the worst examples will have been deceived in the past, so they will come back and keep checking, just to make sure.
If you do not want to deal with this, then you can either move yourself into a protected category(seminaries and convents are always looking for good people), or move away from people entirely (I mostly pursue the Hermit option myself).
So long as the human race is a vibrant and thriving species there can never be an elimination of the expression of sexual interest. The one requires the other, and I do not wish to be part of a dying species.
I can see some utility in this. Imagine if you are toting around your grenade launcher and you see an ad that particularly annoys you. So long as you can frag it, I am all for having it in the game.
Especially effective if you have political advertisements so that you can launch your grenades at a poster with the face of your favorite political demon.
Now, if medicare is going broke in less than a decade, and we put everyone in America on medicaid(or some other government run health care), there will be short-falls. Perhaps not today, or next year, but eventually.
If there are short-falls, then either you ration care, or everyone who seeks care after all the money has been spent will not be able to get any.
If you have Rationing, then you have some person or group(possibly Congress, but they tend to delegate any sort of hard choices to limit reelection problems) somewhere deciding how the available care should be rationed.
Currently, non-life-saving care is rationed out to whoever can afford it. If we go to a 'Single Payer' system, then everyone will want everything they can get without regard to cost, so the payer will need to decide what is cost-effective and what is not.
Now, if the choice is between a life-saving surgery for a 30 year old Doctor who was hit by a car while crossing the street, and a 110 year old man who needs life-saving surgery because his artificial heart is failing, and there is only money/surgical supplies/surgeon time/operating room space/whatever for one of them to get the surgery before both of them would be dead, then SOMEONE must make that choice.
That person or group is what is described by the colorful label of 'Death Panel'
I will freely admit that I am not an expert on the medical field, but I must assume that at some point finite resources will run out and someone will go wanting. When that 'going wanting' involves someone you love dying, then you want to be sure that you are not in a position of listening to some bureaucrat tell you 'for the greater good, your loved one will be allowed to die'
Now, please point out which parts of my logic about finite resources and government decisions about the greater good are flawed such that these scenarios can never happen.
Note: this is a discussion of economics, I have no intention of responding to any messages with profanity or insults and will ignore them if they are posted.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, it's not like we can get more energy out of splitting the nucleus of an atom than is required to split it...
Not drilling is mostly what we have been doing.
There are lots of wells being drilled and operating in the Gulf of Mexico, but only a small proportion of those are for or by US companies. The reason they had to go out so far that they no longer have proven solutions is because of the NIMBY crowd pushing them farther and farther away from shore.
Let them drill where they know how to fix things when they go wrong, and they can fix things when they go wrong, the only problem is, you no longer have a horizon free of oil wells.
When Texas joined the Union, we kept control of our coastal waters, so we have lots of relatively safe off-shore wells, other states just protest the national government when they decide that the coast of state X might be an ok place to look for oil.
Just like the off-shore wind farm that has been going through so many regulatory hurdles off the coast of Florida(?), Texas sent that company a letter stating: when you are done having fun with red tape, come build one of those off our shores.
Perhaps the reduced regulatory oversight is one of the reasons Texas does not seem to be participating much in this little recession the rest of the country is dealing with...
Because a lot more people who wanted a Dick Tracy Watch as a kid could afford this than people who wanted a Leela wrist device as a kid.
It is all about marketing to the audience who both wants to buy it and can afford to buy it.
And what happens when they're the only store in town, or when all the stores adopt the same policy?
Then you open up your own store and cater to the neglected demand.
Simple as that.
No one can force me to sell anything in my store I do not want to sell.
I can't stop you from setting up a store down the street to sell it, but I can keep it off my shelves.
Those laws say that your kid cannot buy those things, there is no law saying you cannot give alcohol to your kid that I know of.
There may be CPS issues with giving cigarettes to your kid depending on where you live, but some places it is probably legal to give those to your kid as well.
I remember one time when I was a kid my dad let me have a taste of his beer(Pat Blue-ribbon I think), and while I doubt it is the only reason, I suspect it may be part of the reason I still do not like alcohol(now over 30).
Last I heard parents are the only ones allowed to give alcohol to a minor, but they are still allowed to do so.
Just to be clear, I personally live primarily in a society where everyone below the arbitrary age of 18 is a Precious Little Snowflake(tm), and would not particularly mind seeing anyone who has had sex with a prepubescent anything be strung up by their genitalia. But that is my society, not theirs.
In the Catholic Church, Everyone is a Precious Little Snowflake(tm) and if you make a mistake, you can just say you are sorry and it is all better. (just make sure you really are sorry or the omnipotent hyper-dimensional being who could prevent you from ever being born, will not like it)
And for those who ask 'Why does God let bad things happen to good people?' the answer is Free Will. Go back far enough and just abut every bad thing is the result of a choice someone made. Even most natural disasters would not affect people if there were not people choosing to live where those events occur. No one can learn if they are shielded from the results of their choices, even when those results are harm to other people.
There is a step that everyone seems to be skipping.
Do you really believe that a priest who has been accused of Pedophilia is just pulled form one parish and put directly into another parish?
I rather expect that every one of them is given the choice: leave the church or go to confession and probably some training.
Now, punishment is a little constrained because once someone has made a sincere confession and done their penance, the sin/crime is no more. This is the same standard that every other member of the church is held to, from the Pope to the guy who only attends mass on Easter and Christmas. Since this whole 'forgiveness' thing is one of the the central tenants of the church, that is what they do for anyone who displays remorse for their actions.
Now, let us say that a criminal who has served their time in jail and has been released as no-longer a threat to society, wants to move to small-town USA and make a fresh start. Is it easier if they broadcast their previous transgressions, or harder? In the Eyes of the State, they are no longer a threat(excepting some specific crimes that are treated differently).
Try looking at the church as it's own country, in a Muslim country, if a woman is raped, then her family must kill her for the dishonor. Should the US then send all of it's rape victims to a Muslim nation for proper justice, or is US justice good enough for US citizens? The same with philandering, if you have an adulterer in the US, then their spouse has cause for divorce and keeping most if not all of the communal property, other places the punishments are more harsh.
The priests have been punished by the laws of their society, those laws may be more lenient than other societies would prefer, but so long as they are applied consistently within that society, how is it reasonable for other societies to claim that their society is broken?
This is just another case where anything different is bad because it is not the way *I* think it should be.
People can't live their lives if they're being aborted.
You're not a person until you can live without being attached to an umbilical cord. Until then you're a parasite.
So if someone is a person depends solely upon the technology available in the area where their parents live?
That is an attribute completely outside of the potential person.
Your argument implies that what would not have been a person 100 years ago is a person now, and that if a pregnant mother were to go on a missionary trip where nothing beyond basic first-aid is available, her unborn might go from being a person to being a parasite.
Every day the latest possible implantation and the earliest possible retrieval get closer and closer together. Will a fertilized egg only become a person to you when the entire process can be conducted without a human body around besides the one growing from the egg?
I have no doubt we will get there, and I see no intrinsic difference between those that are currently gestating and those that will be gestating once that technology is available.
Can you explain that difference to me?
The subsidy's decrease smoothly enough with income so that the marginal return to money is almost always positive. So it would never make economic sense to make less money in order to make it back in health-care benefits. Seems like a big improvement...
Only if you take this bill as a stand alone.
On the other hand, if you add in the sloping costs of other government subsidies(housing assistance, food stamps, and all of those other 'help the poor' subsidies of which there are several if you know how to work the system, or get help to do so), this just makes the already steep ramp off of the government dole even steeper. Not a lot steeper perhaps, but that does not matter much since if they are all put together costs already increase at a pace much more rapid than the increase of income.
So yes, in an airless, frictionless environment this ramp will not make the climb too steep.
In the real world however, this ramp is put on an already steep slope and the whole thing is regularly sprayed down with random patches of grease and glue.
If you refuse to tolerate the intolerant, you will not have an opportunity to understand their point of view and gain their trust to the point of helping them overcome their intolerance.
If the intolerant are sequestered away from those who are otherwise tolerant, then they will not have an opportunity to understand why they should be tolerant, instead their intolerance will be reinforced by seeing how they are scorned by those who claim to be better by being more tolerant.
You would not invite them to activities where they would be uncomfortable, just as you would not pester an acrophobe to attend a wedding in a chapel at the top of a high-rise, or a demophobe to attend a large rally.
Let's say that 80, or even 95% of people are 'good' as in they would not hurt their fellow man to further their own interests.
That gives you that one in 20 people who would be happy to slit your throat because he wants to add your wife to his harem.
At that point you have a number of choices.
And until you get everyone else to agree as to what exactly should be dun about the murderer in their midsts, you can't really move forward.
Lots of people have difficulty believing that someone they know is capable of doing terrible things.
Add in the opportunity for that evil person to persuade those he knows to be gullible, and he can paralyze most of the community with indecision.
On the other hand, if there is an invisible man living in the sky that says 'if an evil person does X, they must be punished by Y' then you have a set of laws that everyone feels they must follow, even if they don't like doing what they are told to do.
If you only have a set of laws, then people will ignore them if they have had an argument with that authority, unless that authority has the power to back-up their decrees.
Back before there was any real law, religion demanded 'en eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'
This was very harsh by our standards, but before that, vengeance and feuding would wipe out an entire family for an imagined slight.
The religions that survive generally do so because they strengthen the society they are introduced into.
If they weakened the society that founded them, then the religion would be wiped out with that people.
(think about the middle Americans, like the Aztecs)
Even now, there are lots of poorly educated people who don't believe they would get caught for committing crimes, but they know that there is that invisible man up there who WILL see them and get them for it in the end, so they don't murder their neighbors for his new shoes.
(ever notice how many ex-gang members get out of the gang by finding god?)
Religion can, did, and still does support civilization.
We cannot become a truly dystopian society so long as religion still holds a strong sway.
(we are slowly becoming more dystopian because religion is losing it's hold, but tragedies like 9/11 help push the pendulum back the other way)
Hmm, 108 matches in the US
10 in my state
2 regarding places I actually have family.
My mother is a male in his 20's (Jacky is a very male name, obviously)
And apparently I only paid about 1/3 the value of my house...
I feel much reassured about my personal privacy.
Within a few millennia we'd be back into a deep ice age. (Slowly, mainly from vulcanism, the CO2 will be replaced in the atmosphere and, with the right orbital forcings, eventually the planet would escape from the ice age again)
Tim.
I think you mean Glacial period and inter-glacial period.
We are currently in an ice-age(you can tell because we have ice-caps that stay there all year)
I imagine it's the same level of contribution that frivolous lawsuits add - nearly 2%!
And when they can afford health care, doctors maximize useless services and tests to push up profits, even when they are duplicative or entirely unnecessary.
That is not for pushing up profits, that is called 'defensive medicine' where doctors must give hypochondriacs every test they request or else risk a malpractice suit with ruinous damages.
So that 300% increase in costs from unneeded tests is actually an indirect part of the costs of frivolous lawsuits.
I doubt that '2%' even includes malpractice insurance.
Example: I was a blood donor for many years and at one point got a false positive on one of the many many screening tests that they are required to do. I went to a hematologist about this positive test result and was told point-blank that I did not have this condition as I had not ever been outside the US and this condition is only present in a small numbers in a few third-world countries. I asked for the test anyway, and they gave it to me, confirming what the hematologist said from the start.
You could try storing liquid nitrogen there, but it would no doubt get hard pretty fast...
"Liquid nitrogen freezes at 63 K"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_nitrogen
There might be a little less of that 'anti-intellect bias' if the self-proclaimed intellectuals did not spend so much time looking down their noses at those who prefer learning practical skills as opposed to esoteric ones, and stop considering everyone who chooses physical labor as ignorant. Painting them as racists does not help much either.
For example, I know one lady who has a part-time job taking care of plants at home depot. She also works in the Anthropology department of the State University and is pursuing a graduate degree in forensic anthropology. But many of people who see her taking care of the plants at home Depot probably think she is just some ignorant farmer...
My sister has a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Spent a tour of duty in the Air force working on the next generation cruise missile, and now is a farrier and farmer.
If you look past those labels you have pasted on them, you might find you have much more in common that you ever thought...
The US is only footing 22% of the bills of the UN? I always thought it was more than that(more along the lines of a majority).
I suppose it is not surprising that the only other country with a double digit contribution is Japan(16%).
Then again, it looks like this is just the operations budget, so does not include things like the troops provided for the various police actions that the UN is so often involved in.
(and that generally seems to be so dominated by the US that they are often called US wars, even though we never seem to annex any of those places we have 'conquered,' unlike the Russians, Germans, or just about anyone else that has ever been involved in wars in Europe or Asia)
Patenting the idea is not so much the problem, the problem is if he asks for unreasonable levels of compensation because of his patent.
If he only asks for 1/3 of the expected savings, it will still help a lot if it is at all cheaper.
Those sections you quoted look more like 'those nasty capitalists are getting more successes at promoting what we want than we communists are with our protest signs' and 'If we do not all help the eco-capitalists then we will all die'
Neither one claims that Communism is wrong, but only that other methods seem to work better.
Also, I would point out that Rush Limbaugh(and I have no doubt others as well) have repeatedly pointed out that many of those old Communists are now using the Environmentalism movement to achieve their earlier Communist aims.
Put those together and I have difficulty seeing any evidence that this fellow is NOT a communist.
Also, according to both Wikipedia and Marriam-Webster a lie is an attempt to deceive.
So if the speaker is stating something that they truly believe, then it is not a lie, because there is no attempt to deceive, it is an attempt to inform using facts that may or may not match reality.
Just as telling an Atheist that "Jesus died for Your sins!" is not a lie if the speaker believes what they are saying.
Now, if this fellow were to publicly denounce Communism, that would be a different story, but identifying new means to achieve the same old aims seems like a pretty suspicious conversion to me...
Hmm, looks like this Glen Beck is not on my local radio. Could be the reason I had no idea who he was.
Don't forget another possibility:
Not the most accurate model available, but both simple enough and accurate enough to be useful for the application at hand.
Newtonian models of gravity are still used for most (all?)space exploration. Sure it does not cover Frame Dragging, but the error bar between Newtonian gravity and general relativity is small enough in most cases that it is not worth the additional effort of using the greater complexity of general relativity instead.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
Things that stir the soul of one culture need not make any sense to any other culture.
Other than having a professional demeanor while at work, I see no reason that a person would need to be a social chameleon. Sure you may dress up when you go to a costume party, or quiet down when attending church, but in general, one should be able to be oneself at all times.
My friends, family, and coworkers could all easily distinguish activities I probably have engaged in from ones I probably would not engage in if given a list, and those will generally all match up very well(not counting the lists from a current or former girlfriend, but those things are private between the participants and need not be shared)
Then again, I suppose not everyone has the foresight to select and train for a career they actually enjoy, and so must put on a mask every day lest their coworkers see the quiet desperation in their eyes as they try to 'make do'
And I suppose that many are not confident in and of themselves so that they feel they must wear a mask to get people to like them, a mask that they must then wear any time they are around their 'friends' who are not really their friends, but friends of the mask that they wear.
Just considering those two situations is depressing enough, I don't even want to consider a person that feels a need to wear a mask around their own family.
Apparently not everyone is up to date.
It is no longer called Global Warming.(or even anthropogenic global warming)
Since the global average temperatures have been going down for the last 10 years(or was that 11, I forget), it is now called Climate Change.
(Just like what happened with 'Global Cooling' becoming 'Global Warming')
All these name changes seem to be fairly similar to how the creationists renamed their issue to be 'Intelligent Design' when people were no longer swallowing it...
I personally would consider anthropogenic climate change to be much more believable if they stopped needing to completely re-work their theories every time we have collected enough new climate data to demonstrate that their models are more assumption and fear-mongering than fact.
There are three things that any credible researcher in any other field would need to provide for peer review before any 'earth shattering' discoveries will be believed:
* Present your source data in an easily examined fashion so that everyone can see if you did cherry picking.
* Publish your models/analysis technique so that others can examine your assumptions and how you reached your conclusions.
* Have some other lab(s) produce reinforcing results when they test your models/data along with any new data that has become available since you presented it in a completed form.
This was needed to confirm Element 114 was produced, so why require less when talking about something that requires economic changes on a global scale?
This year we were supposed to have the worst season of hurricanes on record. Instead it was one of the lightest.
Just give me SOME form of proof that this is not just a bunch of political BS.
And no, a consensus is not science. The consensus was that the speed of light was variable until Einstein showed differently. Before that the consensus was that light traveled through the Ether between the planets.
Give me repeatable experiments and models that continue to work for more than 6 months.
Anything less is politics and scaremongering.
Here is a problem:
Humans are inherently sexual beings.
The survival of the species demands every calory of energy that is not being spent on basic survival(and no few that are) be spent on procreation. That is the first, last, and only goal of our genes: survive into the next generation, then the next, then the next, and so on. Anything that interferes with that will eventually be crowded out by those that do not have that interfering behaviour.
Now, humans have developed a civilization so that survival is not nearly the challenge that it once was, and we have much more available energy to spend on things beyond survival and procreation.
The problem is, we still have the same drives, impulses, and needs that our primitive ancestors had.
We can sublimate and subvert those to a limited extent, but we are fighting against millions of years of evolution for every step we take, and if we are successful, then those abilities/techniques will die out or become rare because those without those abilities/techniques will out-breed those with them.
Society, for the most part, has managed to put some reasonable restrictions on procreation(no close relatives, children below the age of consent, people married to someone else, boss/subordinate, etc.) but outside of those constraints(and some times even within them), a majority of interaction between a person and those people with the appropriate gender, is all about finding out if the person you are speculating about will indeed have sex with you.
That is the way people are wired and we do not have the ability to change this in any significant way.
Any time you join a large group with a vast majority of them desiring a member of your gender/sexuality/hair-style/whatever for their sexual partner, you WILL get propositioned. Even worse, the clumsy/desperate/clueless/less desirable ones will usually predominate(because the 'good' ones have an easier time finding mates).
Then, let's make the gender of those desiring you the one that is more aggressive in seeking procreation.
And, just for kicks, let's make the archetype of the group someone who has a drastically reduced chance of procreating for some reason(social inexperience, shyness, reduced expression of primal sexual desirability traits, etc), and you could be Jabba-the-hut in a dress and get propositioned.
If you want to interact with humans, there are certain facts you will just need to get used to. Some guys in any group of sufficient size will sniff around any female like a male dog checking to see if a bitch is in heat. Even worse, many of the worst examples will have been deceived in the past, so they will come back and keep checking, just to make sure.
If you do not want to deal with this, then you can either move yourself into a protected category(seminaries and convents are always looking for good people), or move away from people entirely (I mostly pursue the Hermit option myself).
So long as the human race is a vibrant and thriving species there can never be an elimination of the expression of sexual interest. The one requires the other, and I do not wish to be part of a dying species.
I can see some utility in this. Imagine if you are toting around your grenade launcher and you see an ad that particularly annoys you. So long as you can frag it, I am all for having it in the game.
Especially effective if you have political advertisements so that you can launch your grenades at a poster with the face of your favorite political demon.
I seem to have a problem then, as my logical deduction seems to say otherwise:
As far as I can tell, there is no limitless fund of money that can be pulled upon, and all wells eventually run dry if you take too much from it.
For example:
http://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/news/medicare-trust-fund-be-exhausted-2017-report-reveals
Now, if medicare is going broke in less than a decade, and we put everyone in America on medicaid(or some other government run health care), there will be short-falls.
Perhaps not today, or next year, but eventually.
If there are short-falls, then either you ration care, or everyone who seeks care after all the money has been spent will not be able to get any.
If you have Rationing, then you have some person or group(possibly Congress, but they tend to delegate any sort of hard choices to limit reelection problems) somewhere deciding how the available care should be rationed.
Currently, non-life-saving care is rationed out to whoever can afford it. If we go to a 'Single Payer' system, then everyone will want everything they can get without regard to cost, so the payer will need to decide what is cost-effective and what is not.
Now, if the choice is between a life-saving surgery for a 30 year old Doctor who was hit by a car while crossing the street, and a 110 year old man who needs life-saving surgery because his artificial heart is failing, and there is only money/surgical supplies/surgeon time/operating room space/whatever for one of them to get the surgery before both of them would be dead, then SOMEONE must make that choice.
That person or group is what is described by the colorful label of 'Death Panel'
I will freely admit that I am not an expert on the medical field, but I must assume that at some point finite resources will run out and someone will go wanting. When that 'going wanting' involves someone you love dying, then you want to be sure that you are not in a position of listening to some bureaucrat tell you 'for the greater good, your loved one will be allowed to die'
Now, please point out which parts of my logic about finite resources and government decisions about the greater good are flawed such that these scenarios can never happen.
Note: this is a discussion of economics, I have no intention of responding to any messages with profanity or insults and will ignore them if they are posted.
Thank you for your time.