and it certainly is no more dangerous than the chemicals it's been replaced with in solder. From my most recent solder coil :
"Lead-free. Do not inhale. May cause dizzyness, irritability and vomiting. If you experience these symptoms immediately contact a physician. Without treatment those symptoms may evolve into coma, severe poisoning and death".
The fact is, from this solder, I do indeed get dizzyness if I inhale the fumes (which is very difficult to avoid). It starts in seconds and stops only 2-3 hours after I stop soldering. This *never* happened with proper lead-solder.
I did indeed visit a physician, who could only tell me to avoid soldering at all, an advice that, if followed, would cost me my job (and my hobby for that matter).
But so long as you feel better about the lead thing, I guess everything's just peachy, right ? My job, my hobby and this whole electronics industry, who cares. And the fact that removing lead leads to *more* and more severe symptoms... what do we care ?
Okay, I'd love to have this discussion with someone. Since attacking another's religion seems to be the favorite sport of atheists let's scrutinize atheism.
What do you think about the rather fundamental flaw in science that Godel uncovered ? Do you believe this proof, and agree that it creates a major theoretical problem for any kind of proof of science that goes further than giving examples of stuff working ?
There are 2 standards of proof, it would seem to me. 1) theoretical proof : deducing whatever conclusion you reach from first principles exclusively.
You know that it has been proven that science cannot satisfy this standard of proof, ever. All of science is subject to the theoretical problem Godel uncovered, and therefore there can be no possible algorithm, not now, not ever, that can tell you if science is correct or not (specifically you cannot check science for consistency, not even in infinite time, and correctness requires consistency).
Obviously deriving the bible from first principles, although perhaps not impossible for every last "rule" of the bible, is not going to work. No matter how many game theoretic/economic/... proofs of, say, the golden rule come, these will never encompass the full text. I would like to add though, that while the idea that the bible is totally flawless is hard to defend, it does uphold a much higher standard of correctness than many other "holy books".
Disproving the quran, which claims that science doesn't work (everything that happens is only subject to the whims of allah and to nothing else. Talk about easy to disprove), and which has direct contradictions (it even publicly admits this, in that it gives a procedure to follow in the case of a contradiction : the more recent verse takes precedence. So "kill the unbelievers", chapter 9 takes precedence over "live in peace if you can" chapter 3 (yes, chapter 9 is more recent than chapter 3)).
Compared to the vedas, again the vedas publicly admit the masses of contradictions you will find within them. However concentrating on these contradictions will turn God against you and "the believers" will surely kill you, with help from Krishna.
Contrasting, it seems to me that the bible is a much more scientific and rational work than many other religions' "holy" texts. Also the bible is one of the few that even aspires to correctness and logical, rational explanations for things. Again I would like to contrast this with the quran or the vedas who claim military success is the source of their justification.
2) Then you have functional proofs
a) for science itself. Functionality of science is uncontested everywhere on earth (though some idiots, e.g. muslims, don't seem to find any contradiction in not believing science works and living on the 6th floor of a highrise, declaring the idiocy of science of a cell phone). Note that this does not mean the effects of science were 100% positive. Take the atomic bomb, or worse : the mix of darwinism and communism that lead to eugenics and the nazi and soviet holocausts. I'm not saying that was correctly applied science, but to say they were completely independant of science is equally stupid. In general, science gets used to kill and even murder. It is not uniformly, 100% good.
b) for the Bible. Again look around you and look at the effect the Bible had on our society. Again I do not claim a 100% uniformly positive effect, but let's be fair : look at the result of 2000 years of Christianity. I cannot think of any stronger proof of any specific theory than where Christian culture brought us today. Remember, this is a functional proof, which has nothing at all to do with theoretical correctness*. All that matters is what the effect is of following this ideology, and I think no-one can claim the effects were anything but astonishingly positive.
c) Atheism. Atheism has a historical record that is beyond merely dismal. It's pathetic. Few, if any, atheist societies ever reached a 100 years of continuity, while there are Christi
Yeast *does* make lots of toxic byproducts. One problem is using contaminated yeast, leading to quantities of (e.g.) HCN in the end product. That's one thing that can go wrong that will kill you when in contact with your tongue before the taste of alcohol even reaches your brain.
Another possibility is moederkoorn contamination.
And the major killer of homebrewed alcohol : simply that nothing at all goes wrong. The lethal dose of alcohol is between 300 and 500 ml. "Whoops I drank a 70 degree bottle" (70% alcohol).
And there is no functional proof of the bible ? Have you looked around recently ?
Strange how all developed countries have such a huge number of churches, and there is really only a single exception to that rule. All regions that did not have the bible, or had it taken from them, are wastelands at best, although "constant warzones for more than 1000 years" would not be all that inaccurate.
Do you suppose this is a coincidence ?
Yes, there is functional proof that math works. And there is actual proof that math is wrong (or at least everything based on the peano axioms).
Even if that proof did not exist (and it's a bit young), math and the Bible have another thing in common. According to the first incompleteness theorem, any mathematical theory is either wrong, or unproveable. This obviously means everyone who says "math works" is making a statement of belief, not the least bit better founded than "God made the world", or Santa Claus.
But atheists that actually know anything about the foundation of mathematics, much less ones that actually take such knowledge into account, now that's rare. Of course, whether they do one or the other, not know about mathematical foundations, or the other, disregard scientific knowledge about mathematical foundations, they remain hypocrites.
Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible. It is conceivable that proof will be given for what the Bible says. But since Kurt Gödel proved his thesis, it is INconceivable that theoretical proof will be given for what science says. People, philosophers and mathematicians have been trying to wring their way out of this particular can of worms for closing on 7 decades now, and not the least bit of progress has been made, everyone still does everything based on the (known to be flawed) Peano axioms (or worse : PFC + C, which is evidently wrong, meaning that math is fundamentally limited : there are valid questions mathematics cannot describe, some embarassingly simple, that are inconceivable to ever get resolved, no matter how much science we know, now or in the future).
It is my sincere hope that this post will make you think a little bit about using correct and rigorous arguments to reach a conclusion. It would make the world a better place.
The solder issue isn't about conserving materials AT ALL. It's "about" lowering the lead content of electronics equipment. It doesn't do any good to anyone, and it's an idiotic idea forced upon all engineers because it's "green". It's being replaced, obviously, by very carcinogenic solvents, much, much more dangerous than the lead ever was.
It doesn't do any good at all, there is no shortage of lead (quite the opposite, so it doesn't conserve anything), and lead isn't any more dangerous than aspartame, which is being pushed because it's "less calories". But hey, it's an idea that can be forced on powerless individuals that makes democrats feel good, so it's unstoppable.
Oh and how do the chinese comply with it ? Simple : they lie about it. But hey, democrats feel good, and that should cover all the bad environmental impact. And it isn't the greenies who come into contact with the dangerous solvents, so who cares about those stupid little electrical engineers ?
These sort of policies, stupid, useless at best, and mostly dangerous, are enough to make a surprising number of electrical engineers HATE environmental policies. For good reason.
No, the "dark greens" are in favor of killing the "non-sustainable" portion of humans. Without oil (as we'll be in 50 years at the latest) that means between 90 and 99% of humans alive today. That's totally unacceptable.
This is merely lefty greens, who feel the need for enforced "communities". You'd be surprised how mainstream this sort of idea is, at least on campus.
When did this become a left/right issue ? Supposedly environmentalism exists across the political spectrum, no ?
Of course only the left wing would find this "shared infrastructure" that is called a slum a good idea. Not that any lefty would ever want to actually live in one, but they're perfectly suitable for all those dissidents and commoners. I'm sure they'd vote for a fence or a wall around them next.
Yes, you'd defineately need to be a lefty, and a sufficiently deluded lefty to think that you yourself wouldn't end up in one at that. No shortage of those though.
Well pretty soon they're going to realize that without oil we're not going to be able to feed even half the world, so if you'll please first move into the slum and never mind the wall they're planning to build next. Pay no attention to those towers with what looks like gun mounts...
After all, if we don't do this, we'd be killing gaia. Now that would be bad.
I do wonder though, industrial alcohol kills whether or not poison is added to it (and home-brewed alcohol is even worse). You could actually formulate this very same policy as trying to get people not to drink the poison by making it taste bad.
The only statistics are the deaths caused by alcohol poisoning, not a single death case reports that the strychnine had anything to do with the death (any kid and his dog will clearly see the difference in a corpse between alcohol poisoning and strychnine poisoning. Someone dying from strychnine poisoning *will* have died in an extremely cramped position, all muscles totally stretched, while alcohol poisoning will slowly lead to multiple organ failure, in other words, they wouldn't have missed it). And every society that outlaws drinkable alcohol, whether or not they poison it, will have lots of dead people on it's hands.
Every large city in the middle east, excepting Israel, has between hundreds and thousands of dead on it's hands due to use of selfmade or industrial alcohol every year. Not 70-year old people dying from liver failure that "probably" was caused by long-term alcohol poisoning like sometimes happens in America (which is a very peaceful way to die, incidentally), but 20 year old, perfectly fit men and women dying painfully after arriving in the hospital. Ryadh, the capital of the saudi women-stoning "kingdom of madness", has over a 1000 dead from alcohol poisoning yearly (including the son of the police chief a few years back, guess he couldn't get the money for imported alcohol from daddy).
Drinkable alcohol is a purified form of ethyl-alcohol. Industrial alcohol is (mostly) Methanol. It has an LD50 of 0.4g/kg. Which means that drinking 70 cl whisky made with methyl-alcohol will kill 50% of the people who drink it.
A third of a bottle of orange juice with just enough methanol to make it taste more or less like a wine will also kill 50% of the poeple who drink it.
Perhaps it's just me, but these numbers could easily have caused 20000 deaths during the prohibition without any help from the government. It seems to me the government would have to have added quite a bit of poison to even match the natural poisonous nature of illegal alcohol, to raise it would very, very easily have resulted in contamination of the entire food chain, which obviously didn't happen. So perhaps it's time to give the benefit of the doubt here, and not blame the government for the deaths of people who were poisoning themselves.
Btw : who voted in these policies ? Well, prohibition:
64th Congress (1915-1917) Majority Party: Democrat (56 seats) Minority Party: Republican (40 seats) Other Parties: 0 Total Seats: 96
Who voted in the poisoning policy ?
65th Congress (1917-1919) Majority Party: Democrat (54 seats) Minority Party: Republican (42 seats) Other Parties: 0 Total Seats: 96
And who voted it out ?
66th Congress (1919-1921) Majority Party: Republican (49 seats) Minority Party: Democrat (47 seats) Other Parties: 0 Total Seats: 96
(The grandfather of Al Gore had a lot to do with these policies, man, talk about a guy that just does not have a very good history)
Actually you can play games with pi's digits that would be rather hard. Say I'd give you 5 consecutive digits and ask you for the position in pi. Since there are infinite solutions to this question, it's not actually predictable (chance of guessing correct would approach 0 rather fast). Or I could give you 5 digits from pi (or any other number) and ask you to give the next number in the sequence. Again, this next number is totally not random, but not predictable in any way either.
Not random, not predictable. Lots of questions about pi are like that.
But this is not what is indicated in markets. Markets are unpredictable due to a chaotic component in their makeup : humans. Only if you were to predict the actions and thoughts of every participating human precisely over long time periods would you be able to predict markets. Presuming that the markets are influenced by real-world events, you'd also have to predict the real world. "Will Obama get reelected ?" is a question to which any serious market prediction system would have to know the answer, because it matters a lot. Same goes for "Will the football season of 2011 be more or less interesting than 2010", because these questions make a large difference.
It's like the weather. The weather (and climate for that matter (second paragraph)), in mathematical terms, consists of a very large collection of mostly random effects. Due to the fact that effects grow over time until they dissipate, but that takes time, you have some amount of predictability in the short term (although sometimes such an effect can have an extreme short-term effect. There are places in the pacific which go from sunny and calm seas to hurricane in about 20 minutes, sometimes right on top of a ship). So in the short term weather "averages out" the different effects (meaning if you see a strong cloud front anywhere, it will start dissipating. If you see any kind of clearly defined features anywhere they will get "blurred" in the short term). But in even the middle term, never mind the long term, new effects will soon dominate whatever you're seeing at any particular time (new cloud fronts, new wind directions, obstacles in the movement of air, unexpected heat sources on the ground, or just the opposite, very cold layers of water that just appear out of nowhere). Since those new effects are the result of idiotically small events (the proverbial "butterfly flap"), the only way to predict weather patterns long term is to track every last human, every last butterfly, and so on. Obviously this is not just impractical, but impossible. So you could say that to even know what the weather (or temperature, or...) is at any given time, you'd have to be God. If you're not omniscient, you only see a small, averaged and smeared out picture of the weather, no matter how precise the instruments you're using. To predict the weather (or climate) with any reasonable amount of certainty, you'd need a simulator that could simulate the entire universe, faster than the universe works. Generally, mathematicians joke that they'd simply use such a simulator to guess tomorrow's lotto numbers and retire to a pacific island, but the point of the joke is that any program that is capable of predicting any real-life chaotic system, such as climate (or even the path of the planets, which is in the long term nowhere near as constant as they seem), has to have the ability to calculate next week's lotto numbers.
The problem is that tiny, seemingly absurdly unimportant variations today make a large difference tomorrow. Another illustration might be that wether you park your car in front of the house or behind it will generate a difference of 5 degrees celcius in the average worldwide temperature in 10 years. On the other hand huge, seemingly important things like the energy absorption rate of the ocean hardly make any difference at all (because whatever effect they have, no matter ho
One thing that disturbs me is that the reasons to believe global warming are roughly equivalent as the reasons osama bin laden gives for stoning women :
"do it or we'll hurt you and kill you and get very upset"
In fairness to bin laden, his eloquence far surpasses the average shrill AGWer.
If AGW proponents could be swayed by facts, and were required to only work with certainties, they would remember : -> climate is chaotic, and as any mathematical course will tell you, it is impossible to predict the progress of any chaotic system without full knowledge (meaning you'd have to simulate every move of every atom, since every atom might initiate a tiny change that is subsequently blown up to global size. The proverbial butterfly's wing flap causing a summer monsoon in algeria)
And before anyone says "but statistics", you should shut up before you make a total fool of yourself. Chaotic systems do NOT follow ANY law. Not the law of large numbers. Chaotic systems simply do not have averages, standard deviations, in fact they are proven to prevent any form of statistical construct from having any meaning in the long term. They do not have averages (because every few weeks the average will change, for no reason but a butterfly flap), they are not predictable (with one exception : some chaotic systems change gradually, so you can say something like "the weather at $time_in_the_future will be the same as today" and you'll be "somewhat" right. Of course anyone who's seen people make actual weather predictions know that they indeed assume weather won't change much at all (70% per day of any prediction I'm told), and then seek out external influences that might upset the balance (the remaining 30%). Guess which of these parts would cover 99.99% of all weather and climate prediction mistakes...)
-> they would realize that the equations they use to calculate energy takeup and release into thermodynamic systems REQUIRE the system to be in thermodynamic equilibrium. That means that it's a perfectly uniform ball, with no variations in any properties. And most certainly no variations whatsoever in thermal conductivity. Needless to say, the earth does not quite obey this basic principle.
So even the simplistic "x energy comes in, y goes out, so temperature rises with x-y * average_heat_capacity_athmosphere_and_ocean" is basically... well... wrong. They are right for the whole of the earth, of course, and do predict the average temperature of the whole system (about 6100 degrees kelvin), for surface temperature, they're useless. Nobody of course asks the obvious question, why the calculations of energy exchange with space do not correctly predict surface temperature, because the answer is so embarassing : they do not relate at all. The earth is not in thermodynamic equilibruim, least of all the athmosphere, so for any part of the system, the reaction is unclear. Temperature might go up in any particular location as a result of lower solar input, temperature might go down as a result of higher solar input (you know, like Obama said. Of course he said this in *defense* of predictions. Or rather he said this because one of the leading figures of the IPCC said "snow will be a thing of the past for England and America except Alaska" in 2003. He did not feel the need to state the obvious : this effect prevents any kind of meaningful long-term prediction for surface temperatures).
And that's still leaving out the massive energy streams that don't arrive by solar irradiance in the first place, for which the earth's magnetic fields are more important than any weather pattern.
And imho, if you look at the numbers, it is mainly a case of reality having a bigger voice than environmental fantasts. Especially financial reality, and the fact that taxes have to double, and government spending has to halve, for almost a century if America is to remain solvent, all this as a result of past fantasts. But of course, such details as living within your means do not concern the "oh no the world is going to die ! You have to do what I say" average AGW idiot.
Very good grasp of the situation. But we're living in the year 2000. If we had this attitude from 1950 and then consistently pushed it worldwide there might be significantly less of a third world.
But today "development aid" and direct aid is the ONLY contributor to so many economies, even for supposedly "modern" countries like Morocco, 50% is direct and indirect aid. By now it's so bad that if aid were to stop to a lot of countries, including even Morocco, they'd lose the ability to feed their own people.
So what are we going to do ? Obviously, evolution was right, the population of these countries, directly dependant on foreign aid, has exploded, necessitating a constant, exponential rise in the aid provided. Evolution says that this will keep rising exponentially until the aid fails, after which "selection" will take place. So what are we going to do ? Either we cut the help at some point, resulting in a massive, worldwide famine, and presumably more than a few wars. However, this could be controlled, and gradual, preventing the worst possible outcomes.
Or we wait until some disaster (like Obama's "fixing" of the economy) prevents us from helping them alltogether (has happened for a few smaller regions already, things involving logistical problems), and we see a worldwide, synchronized, total cessation of aid, resulting in something that could be a billion dead corpses.
How are these countries supposed to get out of this ? For their people, depending on foreign grain supplies is so much more successfull than any farm could ever hope to be. Depending on foreign aid gets you cell phones, tvs, computers and more. What farm produces cell phones ? For a total extreme case, consider palestina. 100% dependant on aid. Negligable internal economy. Has been that way for at least 50 years. Every step of the way someone cared from them, starting with mostly Israeli's, to mostly the UN today. Any house in Gaza has TV, power, telephone, and more than one cell phone, but no way to pay for them or do anything productive with them (often hardly any idea how they work in the first place). Depending totally on foreign "disaster aid" makes any local medicinal service look like russian roulette. Is it any surprise these countries are choosing dependancy ? The only real opposition to this is from cultural or religiously motivated "we don't want to be dependant" parties (parties that should probably in general be considered much more dangerous than extreme-right parties)
It's a nice sentiment, but it won't change anything. We're heading for the "big sudden sessation of aid in the future" case, and anyone even whispering that this might not be the best idea gets shouted down as some horrible racist ("look at all those poor children starving !").
Telling people "it's your own problem" is what makes people creative, and makes economies work. Necessity. It's also apparently very politically incorrect.
So NGO's just get to violate local law whenever they find this appropriate ? They don't even have the small modicum of politeness of using military frequencies only ?
Can I play too ? I see very urgent needs. Very urgent indeed. Of course, you won't be able to receive the BBC radio anymore. Anywhere in the world. But it'd be really cool for me to play tetris with a south korean friend over a radio link.
Excuse me ? How is oppressing the masses not part of Marx' ideology ? Do tell, does "Das Kapital" say anything about pluralism ?
Of course, we all know it does, it say to supress it with violence.
So what exactly did the soviets do that was not in line with Marxism ? Oppressing everyone IS part of Marxism, and it's part of every socialist movement since.
Tolerance for differing opinions, even when they are backed by scientific experiments and/or mathematical proofs has never been high in socialist parties. Even today... we all know what economic theories are believed by socialists (when, rarely, they are more complex than "capitalists evil, we good").
Einstein did many things, and yes his formula was instrumental in predicting the power that a nuclear explosion would have (and yes - he miscalculated the first time, everyone did). However his contribution to the atomic bomb was limited to the suggestion that "matter should be convertible into energy". Not much more than that sentence. Of course, that sentence was the reason a lot of scientists re-examined the properties of known radioactive materials, leading to :
The direct basis for atomic bombs, for a quick neutron-cascade reaction in enriched uranium, laid by these scientists : Otto Hahn (German, Nazi) Fritz Strassman (German, most likely also a Nazi) Lise Meitner, Jewish, who initially received a "special exception" from the Nazi regime for her work, and protection from a thoroughly Nazi university in Austria, but then was forced to flee anyway
But this was only fission itself, and the suggestions that if somehow large amounts of U-235 were used with cadmium-enriched water between them that a "large amount" of energy would be released. This release of energy was not yet a bomb, it is what we call today a "meltdown". Dangerous, very hot, and poisonous, but nowhere near an atomic explosion. Niels Bohr calculated exactly how much energy a meltdown would produce : 200 million electron-volts PER split atom. The principle that guides bomb development was still missing 2 concepts : enrichment and the discovery of "critical mass".
Incidentally, Otto Hahn was part of the nazi nuclear weapon development program (in fact he was the one that suggested the Nazi's start one). Enrichment was eventually mostly perfected by Otto Hahn, in parallel with the enrichment accomplishments in the Manhattan program.
Critical mass, the actual direct cause for an explosion (nazi weaponization of nuclear power at that point was mostly focused on e.g. launching bombs with it, or producing oil with it, that sort of stuff), was discovered by Francis Perrin.
Then, in 1939, all elements to produce a working atomic bomb were in place. Eventually, while Otto Hahn has in fact drawn up plans that would have worked before the Americans had a working plan, the Americans were the first to get a working atomic bomb in July 1945, a month after the fall of the third reich.
This experiment would score... let's see... 1/6. Only reproduction would qualify. If you give it heaps of leeway you might include "metabolism" (though it does not catalyze many reactions at all, just 1 specific one, which does not digest anything at all. Generally metabolism at the very least includes changing sugar or types of oil-like-substances* into RNA) and/or adaptation (since it's just changing the values of a pre-determined function, it's not adaptation like e.g. a bacterium)
That's less than a virus.
* that's right life uses oil (if both oil and oxygen are available. If you look at the structure of RNA and oil you'll understand why, too). Someone call greenpeace and tell them to exterminate these global warmers
Because the car is not going to punch a small, hot hole into the concrete wall, and the 99 walls behind it. I suspect the point that was being made, and was edited out, is that you're not going to be able to shield a living person from things that will impact the vessel with those sorts of energies.
Of course you are... you just make sure it hits a "cushion" that spreads the impact force around. People survive getting slammed into a concrete wall at 90 mph regularly, it's called an airbag.
Oone suggestion I've heard before is to attempt to transfer the impact force into a magnetic field. We cannot currently do that, but there are, for example, plans to make a material that consists of 2 superconductors with a thin layer between them, each directing massive electrical energy in the opposite direction. This would create a situation where anything that wishes to punch a hole in the material would have to exert more force than the electrical field exerts on the material, effectively meaning that this material can be made as strong as you want. And yes, this is not practical, the material in between them would get squashed beyond any material's carrying capacity, and... but surely there are ways to make something like this happen.
Another suggestion heard often is to keep a hot plasma cloud in position with a magnetic field. This would produce an effect very much like the shields around "starship" type ships. Any impact on the cloud would immediately cause very fast moving streams within very hot gas, focused on the impact point, making life very uncomfortable for whatever's attempting to pierce the "shield". Of course, such a shield would not be (entirely) transparent, and you can't just project it anywhere. It would also presumably heat up whatever room it's in very fast (or at least, the cigarette box sized versions, capable of stopping the average ant most of the time, the ones that exist today do).
Or you could just drop the gas entirely, and merely keep a very strong magnetic field going directly. Like the tokamak nuclear fusions reactors do. It is very hard to pierce that magnetic field. Hard enough to prevent a > 5 million degree gas on one side from heating up whatever's on the other side of the field. Getting within a meter distance from a 5 million degree gas cloud will kill any human, but you can comfortably put your hand on the walls of a tokamak reactor at less than 30cm distance from that same gas (but you'll have to make sure the 1.2 tesla magnetic field doesn't throw you across the room, remember to remove your cell phone). Presumably, with an actually working energy source this field can be made a lot stronger, and encompass an entire starship (heh, if they got fusion working in the first place, it would become a whole lot easier to produce a working tokamak reactor. I mean if you could just "order" a 50 gigawatt pulse of 2-3 seconds from the grid, the problem of starting a fusion reaction would become a whole lot less messy).
It wasn't some flashy new idea that emerged over the course of few hours or even a few years.
No ? Because my histories say it kinda was. Of course, the full extent of the ideology was formed not even in years, but in decades, but still, at one point it was a flashy new idea.
Even the "eugenics" that sparked the holocaust was, at the communist international of 1920(thereabouts) a flashy new idea, and at that time it was based on a mostly correct interpretation of darwinism. Of course, that wasn't true anymore 10 years later when it became clear that for some reason evolution refused to obey the fuhrer.
Nor did Panthers invent 'black self-defense' thing.
I'm not sure. I'm not sufficiently familiar with it. In my defence, the black panther party has been somewhat lax when it comes to writing down their ideology and events leading up to ideological changes.
But as a careful guess, my answer would be "yes they did". And even if I were to be wrong about this, that would mean they willingly copied it from some other party, which still makes them guilty of using this.
Rome got the idea of poisoning opposing villages water supplies from the (a sect of the) Jews, including a poison that could actually be used for that. And then they used that weapon 1000x as much as the Jews ever did. Romans are guilty of that act, not the Jews, and it is very much part of what the Roman Republic was (wasn't yet an empire at that point). The fact that they did not invent it neither excuses it, nor means that it is not part of their ideology.
Another example would be muslims' suicide terror. They did not invent it, in that they weren't the first to use it. The Jews of Israel did it before them, and they learned it from their neighbours (who never bothered to write down their history, so possibly they got it from somewhere else too). Even strapping dynamite to an unwilling victim, then sending said victim into a crowd of people and detonating the dynamite is not a muslim invention, they got that from the Tamils of India (who used it against muslims and buddhists, to great effect I might add). Unfortunately, as anyone can testify, suicide terror, including using unwilling terrorists, or even children, is very much part of islam. Terror has always been a part of islam, as can be found in history books that were used in Persia, long before the west even knew what a history book was. The fact that they "did not invent" the tactic is hardly relevant at all, excuses nothing and doesn't change the ideology one iota. It is barely an interesting historical sideline. And as a general rule, if muslims claim to have invented something, you can safely bet they stole it from some far away place, there are only one or two tiny exceptions to this.
Did communist invent struggle for worker's liberation out of whim?
Marx certainly did. He had lots of whims, this was just one he felt particularly whimsy about. Well, at least that's what he wrote down himself, while mooching of his family. Marxism wasn't invented out of some great moral need. It wasn't invented to fix class struggle at all. Marxism was invented for one reason, and one reason only : to find a way to amass power. The sad thing is that that was true from day 1, from the first letter of "das kapital", and it still is, suitably disguised or not.
Great post, technically correct, but totally ignoring the elephant in the room.
Yes, "equal opportunity" is what you say. "Affirmative action", however, is exactly what you say "equal opportunity" is not.
Both are law. So your whole diatribe basically makes one point : "you're misidentifying the law you're complaining about". Of course, you're acting as if this little mistake invalidates the whole argument.
That's just not how you present your argument : it's a direct attack against complaining about the obvious stupidity of this law. In other words, you agree with affirmative action, with racist quotas (oh sorry I meant "racial" quotas, which means the same thing), and you somehow feel the need to attack anyone disagreeing with you with tiny little details.
Your argument is as idiotic as saying "watr" isn't wet, due to misspelling.
It's funny how few people realize that this attitude is actually a cultural trait:
it would certainly bother me in numerous ways if I was hired based on my skin color/nationality rather than my ability. Aside from the fact that it brings one's own abilities and prospects as an employee in question ("Was I hired because I'm qualified or was I hired to fill a quota?"), it's also downright insulting
This is all very protestant of you. You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is based on how much work you do, on how much value you produce for society.
Of course, most cultures see merit in other things. Even something as similar as a catholic, for example, would mostly agree, but would take offence at the implicit connection you draw between money (or value) and a person's worth, which he would consider very improper and very wrong. No, for you a person's worth is related directly to how much worth said (regardless, even, of how much work you put into producing that value, e.g. according to you a ceo who does almost nothing, resulting in a 50% rise in value is superior to one that works 14 hours a day and destroys 50% of the value of the firm, something most other Christian denominations would take offence at).
And that's just the beginning. A nazi, or a black panther, or a tamil tiger, or... would take offence at your definition of value (like the GP). After all, value is first and foremost defined by how arian/black/"diverse" someone is. Anyone with white/black skin will obviously perform better than anyone with black/white skin. Anyone who claims differently is offensive, and should get beaten, or worse.
A communist would take offence at your implication that there is difference at all. Any difference in performance must be abolished by state decree, and the state is god, after all, doing otherwise would imply no "social justice". If you were hired for any reason other than "the party decided it", you should get fired on the spot. A person's worth is determined by how high one's position is in the communist party, and by nothing else.
A muslim would take offence at your failure to differentiate between the "master" and the "slave". Obviously depending on the job, it would be an insult to hire a muslim for it, e.g. garbage collection, or it would be an insult to hire a non-muslim for it, e.g. a police officer. Also, the job description would determine 100% the required gender of the person filling it. Women are not allowed in many jobs, and men are not allowed in others. Segregation must be enforced, in addition the superiority rules that sharia pushes, which must be respected, and muslims are superior, women inferior, and segregation a requirement from allah ("men are superior to women", quran, ch. 4, verse 34) ("muslims are superior to non-believers", repeated every 5 verses or so).
The list goes on. Just about all cultures (except that one sect of christianity and it's direct descendants) would not agree with your feelings at all. This is one of the things that makes them different.
It's funny how one of you two is actually advocating grand social experiments.
It's, of course, the lefty, "dangitman". The one that accuses everyone of racism just for disagreeing with him. It's quite a popular tactic these days. After all, anyone disagreeing with a lefty clearly is not just of a different opinion, he must be a malevolent white capitalist pig.
Did you know that Hitler did that for about 12 years ? Accusing everyone and everything of racism. It was quite effective, too, espeically in getting other countries to adopt nazi policies. Of course that was before the large social experiment that "communism-lite" was started to include the holocaust. Not that executing the holocaust stopped Hitler's complaining about the "racism" that drove the war against the third reich ("communism-lite", what we call nazism, central control, but no total destruction of all markets (eg. 98% corporate tax instead of 100%, this is supposed to make a large difference))
Ah, now you're asking the correct question. What you do is you send government agents into companies, who then get full access to all materials, and get to dictate their terms to management.... which will obviously result, as government interference always does, both in *more* racism and *more* power for government.
It's the perfect democratic policy. It appears to have good intentions, it has bad results, and results in more direct power for government officials, and as a bonus, results in more government officials. After all, pretty soon there will be negotiations about those required percentages, which means all races that don't want to be screwed will have to have a union-like internal government, obviously under control from Washington.
Why is bad results good for democratic policies ? Well quite simply, as their "anti-racist" policies result in more racism, they "clearly" show the need for more "anti-racist" policies, and more and heavier enforcement, resulting once again in more centralized government power.
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A toxic metal used in solder is no more dangerous than an ester, yes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
and it certainly is no more dangerous than the chemicals it's been replaced with in solder. From my most recent solder coil :
"Lead-free. Do not inhale. May cause dizzyness, irritability and vomiting. If you experience these symptoms immediately contact a physician. Without treatment those symptoms may evolve into coma, severe poisoning and death".
The fact is, from this solder, I do indeed get dizzyness if I inhale the fumes (which is very difficult to avoid). It starts in seconds and stops only 2-3 hours after I stop soldering. This *never* happened with proper lead-solder.
I did indeed visit a physician, who could only tell me to avoid soldering at all, an advice that, if followed, would cost me my job (and my hobby for that matter).
But so long as you feel better about the lead thing, I guess everything's just peachy, right ? My job, my hobby and this whole electronics industry, who cares. And the fact that removing lead leads to *more* and more severe symptoms ... what do we care ?
The policy sounds good, after all.
Okay, I'd love to have this discussion with someone. Since attacking another's religion seems to be the favorite sport of atheists let's scrutinize atheism.
What do you think about the rather fundamental flaw in science that Godel uncovered ? Do you believe this proof, and agree that it creates a major theoretical problem for any kind of proof of science that goes further than giving examples of stuff working ?
There are 2 standards of proof, it would seem to me.
1) theoretical proof : deducing whatever conclusion you reach from first principles exclusively.
You know that it has been proven that science cannot satisfy this standard of proof, ever. All of science is subject to the theoretical problem Godel uncovered, and therefore there can be no possible algorithm, not now, not ever, that can tell you if science is correct or not (specifically you cannot check science for consistency, not even in infinite time, and correctness requires consistency).
Obviously deriving the bible from first principles, although perhaps not impossible for every last "rule" of the bible, is not going to work. No matter how many game theoretic/economic/... proofs of, say, the golden rule come, these will never encompass the full text. I would like to add though, that while the idea that the bible is totally flawless is hard to defend, it does uphold a much higher standard of correctness than many other "holy books".
Disproving the quran, which claims that science doesn't work (everything that happens is only subject to the whims of allah and to nothing else. Talk about easy to disprove), and which has direct contradictions (it even publicly admits this, in that it gives a procedure to follow in the case of a contradiction : the more recent verse takes precedence. So "kill the unbelievers", chapter 9 takes precedence over "live in peace if you can" chapter 3 (yes, chapter 9 is more recent than chapter 3)).
Compared to the vedas, again the vedas publicly admit the masses of contradictions you will find within them. However concentrating on these contradictions will turn God against you and "the believers" will surely kill you, with help from Krishna.
Contrasting, it seems to me that the bible is a much more scientific and rational work than many other religions' "holy" texts. Also the bible is one of the few that even aspires to correctness and logical, rational explanations for things. Again I would like to contrast this with the quran or the vedas who claim military success is the source of their justification.
2) Then you have functional proofs
a) for science itself. Functionality of science is uncontested everywhere on earth (though some idiots, e.g. muslims, don't seem to find any contradiction in not believing science works and living on the 6th floor of a highrise, declaring the idiocy of science of a cell phone). Note that this does not mean the effects of science were 100% positive. Take the atomic bomb, or worse : the mix of darwinism and communism that lead to eugenics and the nazi and soviet holocausts. I'm not saying that was correctly applied science, but to say they were completely independant of science is equally stupid. In general, science gets used to kill and even murder. It is not uniformly, 100% good.
b) for the Bible. Again look around you and look at the effect the Bible had on our society. Again I do not claim a 100% uniformly positive effect, but let's be fair : look at the result of 2000 years of Christianity. I cannot think of any stronger proof of any specific theory than where Christian culture brought us today. Remember, this is a functional proof, which has nothing at all to do with theoretical correctness*. All that matters is what the effect is of following this ideology, and I think no-one can claim the effects were anything but astonishingly positive.
c) Atheism. Atheism has a historical record that is beyond merely dismal. It's pathetic. Few, if any, atheist societies ever reached a 100 years of continuity, while there are Christi
Yeast *does* make lots of toxic byproducts. One problem is using contaminated yeast, leading to quantities of (e.g.) HCN in the end product. That's one thing that can go wrong that will kill you when in contact with your tongue before the taste of alcohol even reaches your brain.
Another possibility is moederkoorn contamination.
And the major killer of homebrewed alcohol : simply that nothing at all goes wrong. The lethal dose of alcohol is between 300 and 500 ml. "Whoops I drank a 70 degree bottle" (70% alcohol).
And there is no functional proof of the bible ? Have you looked around recently ?
Strange how all developed countries have such a huge number of churches, and there is really only a single exception to that rule. All regions that did not have the bible, or had it taken from them, are wastelands at best, although "constant warzones for more than 1000 years" would not be all that inaccurate.
Do you suppose this is a coincidence ?
Yes, there is functional proof that math works. And there is actual proof that math is wrong (or at least everything based on the peano axioms).
Even if that proof did not exist (and it's a bit young), math and the Bible have another thing in common. According to the first incompleteness theorem, any mathematical theory is either wrong, or unproveable. This obviously means everyone who says "math works" is making a statement of belief, not the least bit better founded than "God made the world", or Santa Claus.
But atheists that actually know anything about the foundation of mathematics, much less ones that actually take such knowledge into account, now that's rare. Of course, whether they do one or the other, not know about mathematical foundations, or the other, disregard scientific knowledge about mathematical foundations, they remain hypocrites.
Technically science is in much worse shape than the Bible. It is conceivable that proof will be given for what the Bible says. But since Kurt Gödel proved his thesis, it is INconceivable that theoretical proof will be given for what science says. People, philosophers and mathematicians have been trying to wring their way out of this particular can of worms for closing on 7 decades now, and not the least bit of progress has been made, everyone still does everything based on the (known to be flawed) Peano axioms (or worse : PFC + C, which is evidently wrong, meaning that math is fundamentally limited : there are valid questions mathematics cannot describe, some embarassingly simple, that are inconceivable to ever get resolved, no matter how much science we know, now or in the future).
It is my sincere hope that this post will make you think a little bit about using correct and rigorous arguments to reach a conclusion. It would make the world a better place.
The solder issue isn't about conserving materials AT ALL. It's "about" lowering the lead content of electronics equipment. It doesn't do any good to anyone, and it's an idiotic idea forced upon all engineers because it's "green". It's being replaced, obviously, by very carcinogenic solvents, much, much more dangerous than the lead ever was.
It doesn't do any good at all, there is no shortage of lead (quite the opposite, so it doesn't conserve anything), and lead isn't any more dangerous than aspartame, which is being pushed because it's "less calories". But hey, it's an idea that can be forced on powerless individuals that makes democrats feel good, so it's unstoppable.
Oh and how do the chinese comply with it ? Simple : they lie about it. But hey, democrats feel good, and that should cover all the bad environmental impact. And it isn't the greenies who come into contact with the dangerous solvents, so who cares about those stupid little electrical engineers ?
These sort of policies, stupid, useless at best, and mostly dangerous, are enough to make a surprising number of electrical engineers HATE environmental policies. For good reason.
No, the "dark greens" are in favor of killing the "non-sustainable" portion of humans. Without oil (as we'll be in 50 years at the latest) that means between 90 and 99% of humans alive today. That's totally unacceptable.
This is merely lefty greens, who feel the need for enforced "communities". You'd be surprised how mainstream this sort of idea is, at least on campus.
When did this become a left/right issue ? Supposedly environmentalism exists across the political spectrum, no ?
Of course only the left wing would find this "shared infrastructure" that is called a slum a good idea. Not that any lefty would ever want to actually live in one, but they're perfectly suitable for all those dissidents and commoners. I'm sure they'd vote for a fence or a wall around them next.
Yes, you'd defineately need to be a lefty, and a sufficiently deluded lefty to think that you yourself wouldn't end up in one at that. No shortage of those though.
Well pretty soon they're going to realize that without oil we're not going to be able to feed even half the world, so if you'll please first move into the slum and never mind the wall they're planning to build next. Pay no attention to those towers with what looks like gun mounts ...
After all, if we don't do this, we'd be killing gaia. Now that would be bad.
I do wonder though, industrial alcohol kills whether or not poison is added to it (and home-brewed alcohol is even worse). You could actually formulate this very same policy as trying to get people not to drink the poison by making it taste bad.
The only statistics are the deaths caused by alcohol poisoning, not a single death case reports that the strychnine had anything to do with the death (any kid and his dog will clearly see the difference in a corpse between alcohol poisoning and strychnine poisoning. Someone dying from strychnine poisoning *will* have died in an extremely cramped position, all muscles totally stretched, while alcohol poisoning will slowly lead to multiple organ failure, in other words, they wouldn't have missed it). And every society that outlaws drinkable alcohol, whether or not they poison it, will have lots of dead people on it's hands.
Every large city in the middle east, excepting Israel, has between hundreds and thousands of dead on it's hands due to use of selfmade or industrial alcohol every year. Not 70-year old people dying from liver failure that "probably" was caused by long-term alcohol poisoning like sometimes happens in America (which is a very peaceful way to die, incidentally), but 20 year old, perfectly fit men and women dying painfully after arriving in the hospital. Ryadh, the capital of the saudi women-stoning "kingdom of madness", has over a 1000 dead from alcohol poisoning yearly (including the son of the police chief a few years back, guess he couldn't get the money for imported alcohol from daddy).
Drinkable alcohol is a purified form of ethyl-alcohol. Industrial alcohol is (mostly) Methanol. It has an LD50 of 0.4g/kg. Which means that drinking 70 cl whisky made with methyl-alcohol will kill 50% of the people who drink it.
A third of a bottle of orange juice with just enough methanol to make it taste more or less like a wine will also kill 50% of the poeple who drink it.
Perhaps it's just me, but these numbers could easily have caused 20000 deaths during the prohibition without any help from the government. It seems to me the government would have to have added quite a bit of poison to even match the natural poisonous nature of illegal alcohol, to raise it would very, very easily have resulted in contamination of the entire food chain, which obviously didn't happen. So perhaps it's time to give the benefit of the doubt here, and not blame the government for the deaths of people who were poisoning themselves.
Btw : who voted in these policies ? Well, prohibition :
64th Congress (1915-1917)
Majority Party: Democrat (56 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (40 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
Who voted in the poisoning policy ?
65th Congress (1917-1919)
Majority Party: Democrat (54 seats)
Minority Party: Republican (42 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
And who voted it out ?
66th Congress (1919-1921)
Majority Party: Republican (49 seats)
Minority Party: Democrat (47 seats)
Other Parties: 0
Total Seats: 96
(The grandfather of Al Gore had a lot to do with these policies, man, talk about a guy that just does not have a very good history)
I'm saying it's impossible, given 5 digits of pi, to find the postition that particular sequence comes from.
I'm saying the question asked in the parent post cannot be correctly answered, even though it's a perfectly well defined sequence.
Then why don't you answer the question. These are digits of pi ... which is the next digit ?
46457
You say it's predictable, great. Predict it.
I do think we all agree it's not random.
Actually you can play games with pi's digits that would be rather hard. Say I'd give you 5 consecutive digits and ask you for the position in pi. Since there are infinite solutions to this question, it's not actually predictable (chance of guessing correct would approach 0 rather fast). Or I could give you 5 digits from pi (or any other number) and ask you to give the next number in the sequence. Again, this next number is totally not random, but not predictable in any way either.
Not random, not predictable. Lots of questions about pi are like that.
But this is not what is indicated in markets. Markets are unpredictable due to a chaotic component in their makeup : humans. Only if you were to predict the actions and thoughts of every participating human precisely over long time periods would you be able to predict markets. Presuming that the markets are influenced by real-world events, you'd also have to predict the real world. "Will Obama get reelected ?" is a question to which any serious market prediction system would have to know the answer, because it matters a lot. Same goes for "Will the football season of 2011 be more or less interesting than 2010", because these questions make a large difference.
It's like the weather. The weather (and climate for that matter (second paragraph)), in mathematical terms, consists of a very large collection of mostly random effects. Due to the fact that effects grow over time until they dissipate, but that takes time, you have some amount of predictability in the short term (although sometimes such an effect can have an extreme short-term effect. There are places in the pacific which go from sunny and calm seas to hurricane in about 20 minutes, sometimes right on top of a ship). So in the short term weather "averages out" the different effects (meaning if you see a strong cloud front anywhere, it will start dissipating. If you see any kind of clearly defined features anywhere they will get "blurred" in the short term). But in even the middle term, never mind the long term, new effects will soon dominate whatever you're seeing at any particular time (new cloud fronts, new wind directions, obstacles in the movement of air, unexpected heat sources on the ground, or just the opposite, very cold layers of water that just appear out of nowhere). Since those new effects are the result of idiotically small events (the proverbial "butterfly flap"), the only way to predict weather patterns long term is to track every last human, every last butterfly, and so on. Obviously this is not just impractical, but impossible. So you could say that to even know what the weather (or temperature, or ...) is at any given time, you'd have to be God. If you're not omniscient, you only see a small, averaged and smeared out picture of the weather, no matter how precise the instruments you're using. To predict the weather (or climate) with any reasonable amount of certainty, you'd need a simulator that could simulate the entire universe, faster than the universe works. Generally, mathematicians joke that they'd simply use such a simulator to guess tomorrow's lotto numbers and retire to a pacific island, but the point of the joke is that any program that is capable of predicting any real-life chaotic system, such as climate (or even the path of the planets, which is in the long term nowhere near as constant as they seem), has to have the ability to calculate next week's lotto numbers.
The problem is that tiny, seemingly absurdly unimportant variations today make a large difference tomorrow. Another illustration might be that wether you park your car in front of the house or behind it will generate a difference of 5 degrees celcius in the average worldwide temperature in 10 years. On the other hand huge, seemingly important things like the energy absorption rate of the ocean hardly make any difference at all (because whatever effect they have, no matter ho
One thing that disturbs me is that the reasons to believe global warming are roughly equivalent as the reasons osama bin laden gives for stoning women :
"do it or we'll hurt you and kill you and get very upset"
In fairness to bin laden, his eloquence far surpasses the average shrill AGWer.
(is there a crying baby smilie ?)
If AGW proponents could be swayed by facts, and were required to only work with certainties, they would remember :
-> climate is chaotic, and as any mathematical course will tell you, it is impossible to predict the progress of any chaotic system without full knowledge (meaning you'd have to simulate every move of every atom, since every atom might initiate a tiny change that is subsequently blown up to global size. The proverbial butterfly's wing flap causing a summer monsoon in algeria)
And before anyone says "but statistics", you should shut up before you make a total fool of yourself. Chaotic systems do NOT follow ANY law. Not the law of large numbers. Chaotic systems simply do not have averages, standard deviations, in fact they are proven to prevent any form of statistical construct from having any meaning in the long term. They do not have averages (because every few weeks the average will change, for no reason but a butterfly flap), they are not predictable (with one exception : some chaotic systems change gradually, so you can say something like "the weather at $time_in_the_future will be the same as today" and you'll be "somewhat" right. Of course anyone who's seen people make actual weather predictions know that they indeed assume weather won't change much at all (70% per day of any prediction I'm told), and then seek out external influences that might upset the balance (the remaining 30%). Guess which of these parts would cover 99.99% of all weather and climate prediction mistakes ...)
-> they would realize that the equations they use to calculate energy takeup and release into thermodynamic systems REQUIRE the system to be in thermodynamic equilibrium. That means that it's a perfectly uniform ball, with no variations in any properties. And most certainly no variations whatsoever in thermal conductivity. Needless to say, the earth does not quite obey this basic principle.
So even the simplistic "x energy comes in, y goes out, so temperature rises with x-y * average_heat_capacity_athmosphere_and_ocean" is basically ... well ... wrong. They are right for the whole of the earth, of course, and do predict the average temperature of the whole system (about 6100 degrees kelvin), for surface temperature, they're useless. Nobody of course asks the obvious question, why the calculations of energy exchange with space do not correctly predict surface temperature, because the answer is so embarassing : they do not relate at all. The earth is not in thermodynamic equilibruim, least of all the athmosphere, so for any part of the system, the reaction is unclear. Temperature might go up in any particular location as a result of lower solar input, temperature might go down as a result of higher solar input (you know, like Obama said. Of course he said this in *defense* of predictions. Or rather he said this because one of the leading figures of the IPCC said "snow will be a thing of the past for England and America except Alaska" in 2003. He did not feel the need to state the obvious : this effect prevents any kind of meaningful long-term prediction for surface temperatures).
And that's still leaving out the massive energy streams that don't arrive by solar irradiance in the first place, for which the earth's magnetic fields are more important than any weather pattern.
And imho, if you look at the numbers, it is mainly a case of reality having a bigger voice than environmental fantasts. Especially financial reality, and the fact that taxes have to double, and government spending has to halve, for almost a century if America is to remain solvent, all this as a result of past fantasts. But of course, such details as living within your means do not concern the "oh no the world is going to die ! You have to do what I say" average AGW idiot.
Very good grasp of the situation. But we're living in the year 2000. If we had this attitude from 1950 and then consistently pushed it worldwide there might be significantly less of a third world.
But today "development aid" and direct aid is the ONLY contributor to so many economies, even for supposedly "modern" countries like Morocco, 50% is direct and indirect aid. By now it's so bad that if aid were to stop to a lot of countries, including even Morocco, they'd lose the ability to feed their own people.
So what are we going to do ? Obviously, evolution was right, the population of these countries, directly dependant on foreign aid, has exploded, necessitating a constant, exponential rise in the aid provided. Evolution says that this will keep rising exponentially until the aid fails, after which "selection" will take place. So what are we going to do ? Either we cut the help at some point, resulting in a massive, worldwide famine, and presumably more than a few wars. However, this could be controlled, and gradual, preventing the worst possible outcomes.
Or we wait until some disaster (like Obama's "fixing" of the economy) prevents us from helping them alltogether (has happened for a few smaller regions already, things involving logistical problems), and we see a worldwide, synchronized, total cessation of aid, resulting in something that could be a billion dead corpses.
How are these countries supposed to get out of this ? For their people, depending on foreign grain supplies is so much more successfull than any farm could ever hope to be. Depending on foreign aid gets you cell phones, tvs, computers and more. What farm produces cell phones ? For a total extreme case, consider palestina. 100% dependant on aid. Negligable internal economy. Has been that way for at least 50 years. Every step of the way someone cared from them, starting with mostly Israeli's, to mostly the UN today. Any house in Gaza has TV, power, telephone, and more than one cell phone, but no way to pay for them or do anything productive with them (often hardly any idea how they work in the first place). Depending totally on foreign "disaster aid" makes any local medicinal service look like russian roulette. Is it any surprise these countries are choosing dependancy ? The only real opposition to this is from cultural or religiously motivated "we don't want to be dependant" parties (parties that should probably in general be considered much more dangerous than extreme-right parties)
It's a nice sentiment, but it won't change anything. We're heading for the "big sudden sessation of aid in the future" case, and anyone even whispering that this might not be the best idea gets shouted down as some horrible racist ("look at all those poor children starving !").
Telling people "it's your own problem" is what makes people creative, and makes economies work. Necessity. It's also apparently very politically incorrect.
So NGO's just get to violate local law whenever they find this appropriate ? They don't even have the small modicum of politeness of using military frequencies only ?
Can I play too ? I see very urgent needs. Very urgent indeed. Of course, you won't be able to receive the BBC radio anymore. Anywhere in the world. But it'd be really cool for me to play tetris with a south korean friend over a radio link.
Excuse me ? How is oppressing the masses not part of Marx' ideology ? Do tell, does "Das Kapital" say anything about pluralism ?
Of course, we all know it does, it say to supress it with violence.
So what exactly did the soviets do that was not in line with Marxism ? Oppressing everyone IS part of Marxism, and it's part of every socialist movement since.
Tolerance for differing opinions, even when they are backed by scientific experiments and/or mathematical proofs has never been high in socialist parties. Even today ... we all know what economic theories are believed by socialists (when, rarely, they are more complex than "capitalists evil, we good").
Einstein did many things, and yes his formula was instrumental in predicting the power that a nuclear explosion would have (and yes - he miscalculated the first time, everyone did). However his contribution to the atomic bomb was limited to the suggestion that "matter should be convertible into energy". Not much more than that sentence. Of course, that sentence was the reason a lot of scientists re-examined the properties of known radioactive materials, leading to :
The direct basis for atomic bombs, for a quick neutron-cascade reaction in enriched uranium, laid by these scientists :
Otto Hahn (German, Nazi)
Fritz Strassman (German, most likely also a Nazi)
Lise Meitner, Jewish, who initially received a "special exception" from the Nazi regime for her work, and protection from a thoroughly Nazi university in Austria, but then was forced to flee anyway
But this was only fission itself, and the suggestions that if somehow large amounts of U-235 were used with cadmium-enriched water between them that a "large amount" of energy would be released. This release of energy was not yet a bomb, it is what we call today a "meltdown". Dangerous, very hot, and poisonous, but nowhere near an atomic explosion. Niels Bohr calculated exactly how much energy a meltdown would produce : 200 million electron-volts PER split atom. The principle that guides bomb development was still missing 2 concepts : enrichment and the discovery of "critical mass".
Incidentally, Otto Hahn was part of the nazi nuclear weapon development program (in fact he was the one that suggested the Nazi's start one). Enrichment was eventually mostly perfected by Otto Hahn, in parallel with the enrichment accomplishments in the Manhattan program.
Critical mass, the actual direct cause for an explosion (nazi weaponization of nuclear power at that point was mostly focused on e.g. launching bombs with it, or producing oil with it, that sort of stuff), was discovered by Francis Perrin.
Then, in 1939, all elements to produce a working atomic bomb were in place. Eventually, while Otto Hahn has in fact drawn up plans that would have worked before the Americans had a working plan, the Americans were the first to get a working atomic bomb in July 1945, a month after the fall of the third reich.
This experiment would score ... let's see ... 1/6. Only reproduction would qualify. If you give it heaps of leeway you might include "metabolism" (though it does not catalyze many reactions at all, just 1 specific one, which does not digest anything at all. Generally metabolism at the very least includes changing sugar or types of oil-like-substances* into RNA) and/or adaptation (since it's just changing the values of a pre-determined function, it's not adaptation like e.g. a bacterium)
That's less than a virus.
* that's right life uses oil (if both oil and oxygen are available. If you look at the structure of RNA and oil you'll understand why, too). Someone call greenpeace and tell them to exterminate these global warmers
Because the car is not going to punch a small, hot hole into the concrete wall, and the 99 walls behind it. I suspect the point that was being made, and was edited out, is that you're not going to be able to shield a living person from things that will impact the vessel with those sorts of energies.
Of course you are ... you just make sure it hits a "cushion" that spreads the impact force around. People survive getting slammed into a concrete wall at 90 mph regularly, it's called an airbag.
Oone suggestion I've heard before is to attempt to transfer the impact force into a magnetic field. We cannot currently do that, but there are, for example, plans to make a material that consists of 2 superconductors with a thin layer between them, each directing massive electrical energy in the opposite direction. This would create a situation where anything that wishes to punch a hole in the material would have to exert more force than the electrical field exerts on the material, effectively meaning that this material can be made as strong as you want. And yes, this is not practical, the material in between them would get squashed beyond any material's carrying capacity, and ... but surely there are ways to make something like this happen.
Another suggestion heard often is to keep a hot plasma cloud in position with a magnetic field. This would produce an effect very much like the shields around "starship" type ships. Any impact on the cloud would immediately cause very fast moving streams within very hot gas, focused on the impact point, making life very uncomfortable for whatever's attempting to pierce the "shield". Of course, such a shield would not be (entirely) transparent, and you can't just project it anywhere. It would also presumably heat up whatever room it's in very fast (or at least, the cigarette box sized versions, capable of stopping the average ant most of the time, the ones that exist today do).
Or you could just drop the gas entirely, and merely keep a very strong magnetic field going directly. Like the tokamak nuclear fusions reactors do. It is very hard to pierce that magnetic field. Hard enough to prevent a > 5 million degree gas on one side from heating up whatever's on the other side of the field. Getting within a meter distance from a 5 million degree gas cloud will kill any human, but you can comfortably put your hand on the walls of a tokamak reactor at less than 30cm distance from that same gas (but you'll have to make sure the 1.2 tesla magnetic field doesn't throw you across the room, remember to remove your cell phone). Presumably, with an actually working energy source this field can be made a lot stronger, and encompass an entire starship (heh, if they got fusion working in the first place, it would become a whole lot easier to produce a working tokamak reactor. I mean if you could just "order" a 50 gigawatt pulse of 2-3 seconds from the grid, the problem of starting a fusion reaction would become a whole lot less messy).
It wasn't some flashy new idea that emerged over the course of few hours or even a few years.
No ? Because my histories say it kinda was. Of course, the full extent of the ideology was formed not even in years, but in decades, but still, at one point it was a flashy new idea.
Even the "eugenics" that sparked the holocaust was, at the communist international of 1920(thereabouts) a flashy new idea, and at that time it was based on a mostly correct interpretation of darwinism. Of course, that wasn't true anymore 10 years later when it became clear that for some reason evolution refused to obey the fuhrer.
Nor did Panthers invent 'black self-defense' thing.
I'm not sure. I'm not sufficiently familiar with it. In my defence, the black panther party has been somewhat lax when it comes to writing down their ideology and events leading up to ideological changes.
But as a careful guess, my answer would be "yes they did". And even if I were to be wrong about this, that would mean they willingly copied it from some other party, which still makes them guilty of using this.
Rome got the idea of poisoning opposing villages water supplies from the (a sect of the) Jews, including a poison that could actually be used for that. And then they used that weapon 1000x as much as the Jews ever did. Romans are guilty of that act, not the Jews, and it is very much part of what the Roman Republic was (wasn't yet an empire at that point). The fact that they did not invent it neither excuses it, nor means that it is not part of their ideology.
Another example would be muslims' suicide terror. They did not invent it, in that they weren't the first to use it. The Jews of Israel did it before them, and they learned it from their neighbours (who never bothered to write down their history, so possibly they got it from somewhere else too). Even strapping dynamite to an unwilling victim, then sending said victim into a crowd of people and detonating the dynamite is not a muslim invention, they got that from the Tamils of India (who used it against muslims and buddhists, to great effect I might add). Unfortunately, as anyone can testify, suicide terror, including using unwilling terrorists, or even children, is very much part of islam. Terror has always been a part of islam, as can be found in history books that were used in Persia, long before the west even knew what a history book was. The fact that they "did not invent" the tactic is hardly relevant at all, excuses nothing and doesn't change the ideology one iota. It is barely an interesting historical sideline. And as a general rule, if muslims claim to have invented something, you can safely bet they stole it from some far away place, there are only one or two tiny exceptions to this.
Did communist invent struggle for worker's liberation out of whim?
Marx certainly did. He had lots of whims, this was just one he felt particularly whimsy about. Well, at least that's what he wrote down himself, while mooching of his family. Marxism wasn't invented out of some great moral need. It wasn't invented to fix class struggle at all. Marxism was invented for one reason, and one reason only : to find a way to amass power. The sad thing is that that was true from day 1, from the first letter of "das kapital", and it still is, suitably disguised or not.
Great post, technically correct, but totally ignoring the elephant in the room.
Yes, "equal opportunity" is what you say. "Affirmative action", however, is exactly what you say "equal opportunity" is not.
Both are law. So your whole diatribe basically makes one point : "you're misidentifying the law you're complaining about". Of course, you're acting as if this little mistake invalidates the whole argument.
That's just not how you present your argument : it's a direct attack against complaining about the obvious stupidity of this law. In other words, you agree with affirmative action, with racist quotas (oh sorry I meant "racial" quotas, which means the same thing), and you somehow feel the need to attack anyone disagreeing with you with tiny little details.
Your argument is as idiotic as saying "watr" isn't wet, due to misspelling.
It's funny how few people realize that this attitude is actually a cultural trait :
it would certainly bother me in numerous ways if I was hired based on my skin color/nationality rather than my ability. Aside from the fact that it brings one's own abilities and prospects as an employee in question ("Was I hired because I'm qualified or was I hired to fill a quota?"), it's also downright insulting
This is all very protestant of you. You get what you deserve, and what you deserve is based on how much work you do, on how much value you produce for society.
Of course, most cultures see merit in other things. Even something as similar as a catholic, for example, would mostly agree, but would take offence at the implicit connection you draw between money (or value) and a person's worth, which he would consider very improper and very wrong. No, for you a person's worth is related directly to how much worth said (regardless, even, of how much work you put into producing that value, e.g. according to you a ceo who does almost nothing, resulting in a 50% rise in value is superior to one that works 14 hours a day and destroys 50% of the value of the firm, something most other Christian denominations would take offence at).
And that's just the beginning. A nazi, or a black panther, or a tamil tiger, or ... would take offence at your definition of value (like the GP). After all, value is first and foremost defined by how arian/black/"diverse" someone is. Anyone with white/black skin will obviously perform better than anyone with black/white skin. Anyone who claims differently is offensive, and should get beaten, or worse.
A communist would take offence at your implication that there is difference at all. Any difference in performance must be abolished by state decree, and the state is god, after all, doing otherwise would imply no "social justice". If you were hired for any reason other than "the party decided it", you should get fired on the spot. A person's worth is determined by how high one's position is in the communist party, and by nothing else.
A muslim would take offence at your failure to differentiate between the "master" and the "slave". Obviously depending on the job, it would be an insult to hire a muslim for it, e.g. garbage collection, or it would be an insult to hire a non-muslim for it, e.g. a police officer. Also, the job description would determine 100% the required gender of the person filling it. Women are not allowed in many jobs, and men are not allowed in others. Segregation must be enforced, in addition the superiority rules that sharia pushes, which must be respected, and muslims are superior, women inferior, and segregation a requirement from allah ("men are superior to women", quran, ch. 4, verse 34) ("muslims are superior to non-believers", repeated every 5 verses or so).
The list goes on. Just about all cultures (except that one sect of christianity and it's direct descendants) would not agree with your feelings at all. This is one of the things that makes them different.
It's funny how one of you two is actually advocating grand social experiments.
It's, of course, the lefty, "dangitman". The one that accuses everyone of racism just for disagreeing with him. It's quite a popular tactic these days. After all, anyone disagreeing with a lefty clearly is not just of a different opinion, he must be a malevolent white capitalist pig.
Did you know that Hitler did that for about 12 years ? Accusing everyone and everything of racism. It was quite effective, too, espeically in getting other countries to adopt nazi policies. Of course that was before the large social experiment that "communism-lite" was started to include the holocaust. Not that executing the holocaust stopped Hitler's complaining about the "racism" that drove the war against the third reich ("communism-lite", what we call nazism, central control, but no total destruction of all markets (eg. 98% corporate tax instead of 100%, this is supposed to make a large difference))
Sorry for proving Godwin's law once again, btw.
Ah, now you're asking the correct question. What you do is you send government agents into companies, who then get full access to all materials, and get to dictate their terms to management. ... which will obviously result, as government interference always does, both in *more* racism and *more* power for government.
It's the perfect democratic policy. It appears to have good intentions, it has bad results, and results in more direct power for government officials, and as a bonus, results in more government officials. After all, pretty soon there will be negotiations about those required percentages, which means all races that don't want to be screwed will have to have a union-like internal government, obviously under control from Washington.
Why is bad results good for democratic policies ? Well quite simply, as their "anti-racist" policies result in more racism, they "clearly" show the need for more "anti-racist" policies, and more and heavier enforcement, resulting once again in more centralized government power.