Unknown. If it would have bothered me, why? Innate or cultural? (Freudians need not reply.) And if I'd been bothered, would I have been scarred, or would it have bothered me in the same way that having to do homework bothered me? Would I have fewer sexual hangups now?
I have friends who know perfectly well just what kinds of sex their parents enjoy; they seem more well-balanced than average but I don't know if there's a causal relationship buried in there somewhere...
This is a funny question, but also insightful. That is--will the patent examiners who approved this one be fired for incompetence? This ruling means nothing unless it successfully pushes for accountability. Treat ninja as a proxy for some form of punishment, and answer me this: who is the guilty party, exactly? What will be done to them?
Americans have so many deep issues with their sexuality that whatever we're doing is obviously very far from working.
A friend and I were discussing this a few weeks ago: if we had sex in public, showing real, normal, healthy sex and making no effort to hide it from our culture's children, how would they be different? Does making sure that sex only takes place behind closed doors help anyone? How? How exactly would you, as a middle-school kid, have been scarred if your parents had occasionally made sweet loooove on the dinner table after dessert?
Serious question here: does anyone know of any research into whether sexual content is actually harmful to anyone? Helpful? Scarring? Enlightening? Erotic, obviously, but let's ignore that one for now, and references to xkcd #598 are unnecessary:) I'm seriously interested in controlled studies on this topic, but anecdote and speculation (and puerile comments about the previous paragraph) could be fun too if you're really sure you're witty.
And finally, all those things that annoy you about sense of smell are probably also helping to save your life. It lets you know that something is wrong (bad air, bad food, bad place, etc).
It's a bit of a toss-up, really. Yes, there are annoying smells telling you that something dangerous and unhealthy is going on, but the law almost never gives you recourse--all you can do is run. Smokers can smoke, drivers can drive, Bostonians can dump shit into the (less stinky than it used to be) Charles, chemical companies (eg. NECCO) can dump whatever they like into the air, neighbours can spray TruGreen on their lawns... certainly it's not that hard to make a case that the dangerous things you can do something about are rare enough that the ones you can't are more trouble than they're worth. A life spent running from danger is pretty unhealthy, for very intense psychological reasons. It can be better to just deal with a little harm to your body than to live in a perpetual state of being the bitch of whomever is making stinky.
Too bad we don't know how to imitate free market's ability to optimally allocate resources in rigid government setups...
I wonder what would happen if we paid, say, x% of our taxes to specific political parties. Better yet, designate some large percentage of your tax money for specific government programs.
Rolling resistance goes through the roof! This might increase the average energy use per distance travelled significantly, although I suppose that it might provide incentive for people to drive more slowly (less wind resistance) and to avoid driving more often, both of which are good things. I wonder how it will pan out.
.
A real pity, though--bikes are a viable form of transportation on pavement where you can easily average 20mph, but forget it on gravel (and if you still want to bike, you really need not only slower but also more expensive and heavier bikes with suspension and knobby tires). One more reason for people to refuse to bike anywhere.
We'd like to save the world and all that, but honestly we'd rather ensure that when everyone dies, we're the richest.
.
Actually, it seems to me that our national policy should keep in mind that education in the USA is subpar, as is the scale of cleaner energy. Therefore we're likely to continue to steadily fall behind in the era of clean energy research. I would think that it makes sense for us to try to anticipate needing to borrow IP from more advanced countries. More financial incentive is wonderful if you have the tools.
You're trying to cure your loneliness by surrounding yourself with friends! How's that ever going to work? --Jane, "Coupling"
I thought that was very insightful, even though it's probably designed to sound silly. Interacting with others (sexually or otherwise) is just a band-aid; it can be helpful for jumpstarting self-esteem, but by itself isn't going to do much for you if you're not at peace with yourself.
It's lovely that they're going to try to assess sightings for potential threat, but I'm sort of curious what they would plan to do about an invading race that has interstellar travel capabilities. Just knowing how you're going to die isn't terribly useful--is anyone better off since the discovery of global warming, topsoil loss, groundwater toxification etc, many decades ago?
Well, duh. Kittens are waaaaaaay cuter. Besides, while there are undeniably far too many people, cats aren't really such significant spike on the Shelden spectrum. Also, while killing humans has palpable benefits to most of the people left alive, killing kittens really doesn't.
People vote based on feelings of solidarity far more often than on reason. Plenty of people voted for McCain because his competitor was a nigger. Many millions voted for Bush because he was in or below their own IQ bracket. What's your point?
Of course, it's also possible that blacks are just that much more intelligent than mainstream Americans.
What you say is interesting, but it's off-topic. Why am I even responding?
"Linux OS" has many more visible layers. Most people would consider X11 part of the OS, so why not the desktop environment too?
Fair enough--it is under Windows, MacOS, NeXTstep, etc... But that means that as a software developer I'm not looking at producing a product for "Linux", an OS with even 1% (or whatever) marketshare, because saying "written for Linux" doesn't mean very much (at least for the UI portions of my product). Now I must develop for KDE and get 0.4% marketshare etc. Why bother?
This is in large part why you won't see real software for KDE or Gnome anytime soon, and why it irks me so much when the KDE and Gnome developers keep assuming that your whole environment ever can be all-KDE etc. Good luck getting a "KDE version" of Matlab or Mathematica or any serious software. Skype for Linux is a joke. Anyone want AutoCad or Rhino, or games? Good luck!
It's telling that I can run Linux as my only OS: the only commercial software I usually need is Matlab, and Matlab works just fine without a KDE or Gnome version. Why is that, exactly?
As long as Gnome etc eliminate the attitude that you must be running all-Gnome-etc apps then it can't do too much harm. The moment anyone says "Problems? You need to [rewrite that for KDE | relink that against KDE libraries]" (an attitude I couldn't believe existed the first few times I encountered it) Linux is done.
Unless doing full screen games or something other that usually requires exclusive access to the sound card
Why does a full-screen game require exclusive access to the sound card? That seems pretty antisocial. I can't game with my own soundtrack? I can't game while teleconferencing with my opponent?...or even hear the VOIP phone ring??
it would be best if sound enabled applications used API of sound-mixing deamons/abstractions such as ESD & Artd (on old Gnome and KDE) or PulseAudio and Phonon (on more recent Gnome and KDE installations).
That's four already, and there are plenty more. By the way, why the hell should my OS's sound interface be tied to some glorified applet suite? If I were a software developer I too would concentrate on an OS that had industrial-grade (ie. standard, maintainable, guaranteed) interfaces. Too much of Linux is still written by people who have too much fun playing alone and being able to point to something and say "mine!", and too little interest in compromise for the greater good.
At least ALSA usually plays nicely on my ThinkPad. Phew:)
[Linux] is the OS of choice, at least in science departments.
Depends on the department: at best it is the OS of choice by a slim margin; in many fields it is still a fringe OS. Many of the experimental sciences use proprietary data acquisition software, and all too often it only runs under Windows. Check out MIT Neuroscience, for example. Or check out LabView, sold with the ubiquitous National Instruments data acquisition boards. Sure, there are good Linux alternatives (I used Comedi way back when) but the NI software supports Windows and MacOS.
Of course, a fair number of the scientists I've worked with there use a Windows box for data acquisition and then MacOS for data processing etc. Some of those--especially the older ones and the ones who came to neuroscience from physics--use TeX, but by no means all.
We'll see what continued funding cuts do to academics' tolerance for expensive licenses. But for now you're wrong. Furthermore, as it is, simply having to maintain a Linux distribution is a chore that real scientists don't appreciate in the way that GnoDE developers expect; the Linux desktop (and even to a large degree the OS--driver support is still not anywhere near what MacOS can offer) is in many senses a high-maintenance toy. If Linux is more powerful than Windows but Windows lets people stop sysadminsturbating and get actual work done, then Windows wins.
Note that I have been running Linux since kernel 0.98.5, and writing papers in TeX since 1992. I'm comfortable with them, but they are very much not for everyone, and many scientists realise this.
Galeon has had left-side tabbed browsing for at least 6 years (perhaps many more?). I routinely have 25 tabs open and it is not the least bit awkward. More than that becomes problematic...
Of course, due to the developers' dearth of coherent thought when they tried to find a target market, Galeon is broken in some ways, awkward in other ways, essentially unmaintained, and almost unknown. Awwww...
We have known for decades that burning fossil fuels is harmful in many ways, and we've known of many possible solution paths that needed investigating. The Obama administration is evaluating solutions for likely effectiveness in cleaning up our shit. The Bush administration evaluated solutions for likely effectiveness in buying his friends more mansions. It is disingenuous to claim that these are the same.
While you have a right to be an asshole, you should expect people to be assholes back to you if you are one.
Yes, but these weren't people, they were police officers. Just like normal assholes, when they break the law, they should be held accountable. This isn't The Law cuffing a guy--he had not broken any law--but just some bloke with a gun and handcuffs randomly assaulting someone. And as such he should probably be locked up.
Furthermore, "a little politeness" in this case would perhaps not reveal an abuse of power. It's important for people to be assholes to those in power when the former are clearly in the right, to make sure that the latter are sufficiently grown up and wise to do what society trusts them to do.
Of course, my own little opinion is that those with more power ought to be held to a higher standard. Police officers in uniform breaking the law with police equipment ought to be fired, fined, and jailed. Politicians should be squeaky clean. The rich ought to be held to a higher standard than the poor... *wistful sigh*
Interestingly, I find that American liberals are very much about "rights" that the government owes them.
The right to free healthcare, the right to a place to live, the right to free food.
There is no responsibility for your actions, you will be taken care of no matter what. The lesson of failure is not a consideration.
I completely agree, actually. I think that a society that provides healthcare is nice (I grew up in a country that has it; I'm still stunned at how vigorously Americans resist it), but it bugs me that so many whiny liberals couch it in terms of "rights". The place to live--I do believe that we have a right to that, but only inasmuch as land is a shared resource, and I don't consider it acceptable that people can put a fence around it and shoot people who approach. The right to housing is an odd concept, to be sure. Food? You can guess what I think of that. Other things? I regard rights as personal: if you make something, it's yours, and nobody should be able to take it away from you unwilling.
On the other hand, the "lesson of failure" can be a mixed blessing. Failures that you can recover from are wonderful--you learn and grow. Failures that destroy your life don't do anyone any good, and too easily create a hereditary underclass. I do like the idea of pushing the line a little more towards allowing people to learn from a few failures. After all, individuals who tolerate high personal risk can sometimes bring great things to society. Look at the microcosm of inventors, or those who drop out of med school to compose symphonies (ok, there aren't really any good classical composers out there right now. Bad example). And in the case of health care, responsible life choices reduce your chances of incurring bankrupting medical debt, but do not eliminate it. I'd love to see a public health care system that rewards simple self-care like staying in shape. Maybe tax people by the pound?;)
While liberals start with individual rights and expand them towards the right to force society to take care of you, my impression is that conservatives start from the same place and wander off in the opposite direction. They support the right to exploit/destroy a public resource--minerals, air, water, land--that nobody created, and the right to screw someone else out of it. To me that is no different than the right that any bully claims: I'll take what I want, and if you don't like it, you'll have to become a bigger bully.
The idea of tying conservatism and religion (not by you, specifically) is a smear job to be honest. It instantly vilifies and polarizes the issues.
That smear job was pretty much perpetrated by Bush, wasn't it? And while religious people have been making trouble in the USA for ages, there was a time in recent history when they coexisted quite peaceably with everyone else. Many still do, but I'm sure one could make a case for politics polarising religion as easily as vice versa?
Good point about Roosevelt etc. I forgot about that. But yes, I assumed we're mostly discussing our impressions of the modern meanings of the monikers.
I'm mostly immune--I use my car only when I really can't go by bike, and on many days I use the bus. Now law enforcement stands to lose out if we move towards responsible, sustainable transportation. Expect them to join the fight on the side of the bad guys...
15000 miles/year is not inflated in the west. Most people I know go significantly further. But let's work with that.
Wear and tear on your car tends to be assessed at well over 50 cents/mile, for another $7500/year.
Insurance will only go down a lot if you get rid of your car, or if good public transportation can let you get away with an older one. Of course, if everyone started taking public transportation there would be a drastic reduction in accident rates, so insurance would go way down for everyone.
The time you spend in your car is hard to spend wisely. In a train, you can read, teleconference, program, study, etc: it can be time well-spent. What is your time worth?
Health care costs are high largely due to obesity, not to mention the toxics and carcinogens that driving causes. Moving away from cars would guarantee everyone at least a little daily exercise, leading to a drastic reduction in those costs.
Driving is dangerous. In the USA, we have 40000 deaths/year due to car crashes: maybe 1 in every 80 people you know will die in a car crash. The serious injury rate is at least 20 times that. What is the cost of all this?
Who do you suppose is paying for our wars to secure the oil we need? These wars will increase if we keep driving.
It is disingenuous to assume that gas is the only cost.
So work to make public transportation work better. It can, you know--Californians have a history of being the car (and tire) companies' bitches, but you could decide that you don't like being at their mercy all the time.
Yes, your situation is atrocious. But that's because everyone in your area has allowed it to become atrocious.
Furthermore, a California without an effective network of bike paths is truly an embarassment to humanity. The terrain in the densely populated areas is flat, the weather is perfect for 75% of all days even in the Bay Area let alone further south, and you have health and pollution crises unprecedented in human history. WTF??
Of course, coffee brewed at 100C tends to be bitter, but humans scald quickly around 55C, and most decent coffee is brewed somewhere between 80 and 94 degrees. The trick is knowing that some food is prepared too hot to consume. Duh.
For example, I'd laugh if McD's started serving pork that had never been brought above 55 degrees.
Forget decisions. The first step is filtering information, and it's obvious that the average bloke can't tell the difference between good science and industry propaganda. Not that the government has ever been very good about science either (even without the intellectual rape of the past 8 years), but at least Obama has good intentions in that respect.
I have the impression that "scientists" are, like everything else, viewed much like sports teams in this country. Nobody cares whether science is good or bad, and honestly most people don't even know that there is a way to tell truth from lies (after all, religions have claimed to be able to do that for centuries, and to the uneducated rednecks who make up 70% of our population the different claims to truth are indistinguishable). So for the non-scientist, you just pick your home team and you hope that it wins.
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Unknown. If it would have bothered me, why? Innate or cultural? (Freudians need not reply.) And if I'd been bothered, would I have been scarred, or would it have bothered me in the same way that having to do homework bothered me? Would I have fewer sexual hangups now?
I have friends who know perfectly well just what kinds of sex their parents enjoy; they seem more well-balanced than average but I don't know if there's a causal relationship buried in there somewhere...
This is a funny question, but also insightful. That is--will the patent examiners who approved this one be fired for incompetence? This ruling means nothing unless it successfully pushes for accountability. Treat ninja as a proxy for some form of punishment, and answer me this: who is the guilty party, exactly? What will be done to them?
Americans have so many deep issues with their sexuality that whatever we're doing is obviously very far from working.
A friend and I were discussing this a few weeks ago: if we had sex in public, showing real, normal, healthy sex and making no effort to hide it from our culture's children, how would they be different? Does making sure that sex only takes place behind closed doors help anyone? How? How exactly would you, as a middle-school kid, have been scarred if your parents had occasionally made sweet loooove on the dinner table after dessert?
Serious question here: does anyone know of any research into whether sexual content is actually harmful to anyone? Helpful? Scarring? Enlightening? Erotic, obviously, but let's ignore that one for now, and references to xkcd #598 are unnecessary :) I'm seriously interested in controlled studies on this topic, but anecdote and speculation (and puerile comments about the previous paragraph) could be fun too if you're really sure you're witty.
And finally, all those things that annoy you about sense of smell are probably also helping to save your life. It lets you know that something is wrong (bad air, bad food, bad place, etc).
It's a bit of a toss-up, really. Yes, there are annoying smells telling you that something dangerous and unhealthy is going on, but the law almost never gives you recourse--all you can do is run. Smokers can smoke, drivers can drive, Bostonians can dump shit into the (less stinky than it used to be) Charles, chemical companies (eg. NECCO) can dump whatever they like into the air, neighbours can spray TruGreen on their lawns... certainly it's not that hard to make a case that the dangerous things you can do something about are rare enough that the ones you can't are more trouble than they're worth. A life spent running from danger is pretty unhealthy, for very intense psychological reasons. It can be better to just deal with a little harm to your body than to live in a perpetual state of being the bitch of whomever is making stinky.
That said, I still pretty much agree with you :)
Too bad we don't know how to imitate free market's ability to optimally allocate resources in rigid government setups...
I wonder what would happen if we paid, say, x% of our taxes to specific political parties. Better yet, designate some large percentage of your tax money for specific government programs.
Rolling resistance goes through the roof! This might increase the average energy use per distance travelled significantly, although I suppose that it might provide incentive for people to drive more slowly (less wind resistance) and to avoid driving more often, both of which are good things. I wonder how it will pan out.
.
A real pity, though--bikes are a viable form of transportation on pavement where you can easily average 20mph, but forget it on gravel (and if you still want to bike, you really need not only slower but also more expensive and heavier bikes with suspension and knobby tires). One more reason for people to refuse to bike anywhere.
We'd like to save the world and all that, but honestly we'd rather ensure that when everyone dies, we're the richest.
.
Actually, it seems to me that our national policy should keep in mind that education in the USA is subpar, as is the scale of cleaner energy. Therefore we're likely to continue to steadily fall behind in the era of clean energy research. I would think that it makes sense for us to try to anticipate needing to borrow IP from more advanced countries. More financial incentive is wonderful if you have the tools.
You're trying to cure your loneliness by surrounding yourself with friends! How's that ever going to work? --Jane, "Coupling"
I thought that was very insightful, even though it's probably designed to sound silly. Interacting with others (sexually or otherwise) is just a band-aid; it can be helpful for jumpstarting self-esteem, but by itself isn't going to do much for you if you're not at peace with yourself.
It's lovely that they're going to try to assess sightings for potential threat, but I'm sort of curious what they would plan to do about an invading race that has interstellar travel capabilities. Just knowing how you're going to die isn't terribly useful--is anyone better off since the discovery of global warming, topsoil loss, groundwater toxification etc, many decades ago?
Well, duh. Kittens are waaaaaaay cuter. Besides, while there are undeniably far too many people, cats aren't really such significant spike on the Shelden spectrum. Also, while killing humans has palpable benefits to most of the people left alive, killing kittens really doesn't.
</bwahahaha>
Very good! I wish I had mod points; you need a "+1 pointing out the obvious truth that everyone else somehow missed".
People vote based on feelings of solidarity far more often than on reason. Plenty of people voted for McCain because his competitor was a nigger. Many millions voted for Bush because he was in or below their own IQ bracket. What's your point?
Of course, it's also possible that blacks are just that much more intelligent than mainstream Americans.
What you say is interesting, but it's off-topic. Why am I even responding?
"Linux OS" has many more visible layers. Most people would consider X11 part of the OS, so why not the desktop environment too?
Fair enough--it is under Windows, MacOS, NeXTstep, etc... But that means that as a software developer I'm not looking at producing a product for "Linux", an OS with even 1% (or whatever) marketshare, because saying "written for Linux" doesn't mean very much (at least for the UI portions of my product). Now I must develop for KDE and get 0.4% marketshare etc. Why bother?
This is in large part why you won't see real software for KDE or Gnome anytime soon, and why it irks me so much when the KDE and Gnome developers keep assuming that your whole environment ever can be all-KDE etc. Good luck getting a "KDE version" of Matlab or Mathematica or any serious software. Skype for Linux is a joke. Anyone want AutoCad or Rhino, or games? Good luck!
It's telling that I can run Linux as my only OS: the only commercial software I usually need is Matlab, and Matlab works just fine without a KDE or Gnome version. Why is that, exactly?
As long as Gnome etc eliminate the attitude that you must be running all-Gnome-etc apps then it can't do too much harm. The moment anyone says "Problems? You need to [rewrite that for KDE | relink that against KDE libraries]" (an attitude I couldn't believe existed the first few times I encountered it) Linux is done.
Unless doing full screen games or something other that usually requires exclusive access to the sound card
Why does a full-screen game require exclusive access to the sound card? That seems pretty antisocial. I can't game with my own soundtrack? I can't game while teleconferencing with my opponent? ...or even hear the VOIP phone ring??
it would be best if sound enabled applications used API of sound-mixing deamons/abstractions such as ESD & Artd (on old Gnome and KDE) or PulseAudio and Phonon (on more recent Gnome and KDE installations).
That's four already, and there are plenty more. By the way, why the hell should my OS's sound interface be tied to some glorified applet suite? If I were a software developer I too would concentrate on an OS that had industrial-grade (ie. standard, maintainable, guaranteed) interfaces. Too much of Linux is still written by people who have too much fun playing alone and being able to point to something and say "mine!", and too little interest in compromise for the greater good.
At least ALSA usually plays nicely on my ThinkPad. Phew :)
[Linux] is the OS of choice, at least in science departments.
Depends on the department: at best it is the OS of choice by a slim margin; in many fields it is still a fringe OS. Many of the experimental sciences use proprietary data acquisition software, and all too often it only runs under Windows. Check out MIT Neuroscience, for example. Or check out LabView, sold with the ubiquitous National Instruments data acquisition boards. Sure, there are good Linux alternatives (I used Comedi way back when) but the NI software supports Windows and MacOS.
Of course, a fair number of the scientists I've worked with there use a Windows box for data acquisition and then MacOS for data processing etc. Some of those--especially the older ones and the ones who came to neuroscience from physics--use TeX, but by no means all.
We'll see what continued funding cuts do to academics' tolerance for expensive licenses. But for now you're wrong. Furthermore, as it is, simply having to maintain a Linux distribution is a chore that real scientists don't appreciate in the way that GnoDE developers expect; the Linux desktop (and even to a large degree the OS--driver support is still not anywhere near what MacOS can offer) is in many senses a high-maintenance toy. If Linux is more powerful than Windows but Windows lets people stop sysadminsturbating and get actual work done, then Windows wins.
Note that I have been running Linux since kernel 0.98.5, and writing papers in TeX since 1992. I'm comfortable with them, but they are very much not for everyone, and many scientists realise this.
Galeon has had left-side tabbed browsing for at least 6 years (perhaps many more?). I routinely have 25 tabs open and it is not the least bit awkward. More than that becomes problematic...
Of course, due to the developers' dearth of coherent thought when they tried to find a target market, Galeon is broken in some ways, awkward in other ways, essentially unmaintained, and almost unknown. Awwww...
Only if the blank CD is broken up into blank 4'33" tracks. Although I hear Glenn Gould's recording of that piece is less than 2 minutes long.
I'm off to copyright derivatives of all classical compositions made by not taking the repeats.
Don't be an idiot.
We have known for decades that burning fossil fuels is harmful in many ways, and we've known of many possible solution paths that needed investigating. The Obama administration is evaluating solutions for likely effectiveness in cleaning up our shit. The Bush administration evaluated solutions for likely effectiveness in buying his friends more mansions. It is disingenuous to claim that these are the same.
While you have a right to be an asshole, you should expect people to be assholes back to you if you are one.
Yes, but these weren't people, they were police officers. Just like normal assholes, when they break the law, they should be held accountable. This isn't The Law cuffing a guy--he had not broken any law--but just some bloke with a gun and handcuffs randomly assaulting someone. And as such he should probably be locked up.
Furthermore, "a little politeness" in this case would perhaps not reveal an abuse of power. It's important for people to be assholes to those in power when the former are clearly in the right, to make sure that the latter are sufficiently grown up and wise to do what society trusts them to do.
Of course, my own little opinion is that those with more power ought to be held to a higher standard. Police officers in uniform breaking the law with police equipment ought to be fired, fined, and jailed. Politicians should be squeaky clean. The rich ought to be held to a higher standard than the poor... *wistful sigh*
Thanks for the response!
Interestingly, I find that American liberals are very much about "rights" that the government owes them.
The right to free healthcare, the right to a place to live, the right to free food. There is no responsibility for your actions, you will be taken care of no matter what. The lesson of failure is not a consideration.
I completely agree, actually. I think that a society that provides healthcare is nice (I grew up in a country that has it; I'm still stunned at how vigorously Americans resist it), but it bugs me that so many whiny liberals couch it in terms of "rights". The place to live--I do believe that we have a right to that, but only inasmuch as land is a shared resource, and I don't consider it acceptable that people can put a fence around it and shoot people who approach. The right to housing is an odd concept, to be sure. Food? You can guess what I think of that. Other things? I regard rights as personal: if you make something, it's yours, and nobody should be able to take it away from you unwilling.
On the other hand, the "lesson of failure" can be a mixed blessing. Failures that you can recover from are wonderful--you learn and grow. Failures that destroy your life don't do anyone any good, and too easily create a hereditary underclass. I do like the idea of pushing the line a little more towards allowing people to learn from a few failures. After all, individuals who tolerate high personal risk can sometimes bring great things to society. Look at the microcosm of inventors, or those who drop out of med school to compose symphonies (ok, there aren't really any good classical composers out there right now. Bad example). And in the case of health care, responsible life choices reduce your chances of incurring bankrupting medical debt, but do not eliminate it. I'd love to see a public health care system that rewards simple self-care like staying in shape. Maybe tax people by the pound? ;)
While liberals start with individual rights and expand them towards the right to force society to take care of you, my impression is that conservatives start from the same place and wander off in the opposite direction. They support the right to exploit/destroy a public resource--minerals, air, water, land--that nobody created, and the right to screw someone else out of it. To me that is no different than the right that any bully claims: I'll take what I want, and if you don't like it, you'll have to become a bigger bully.
The idea of tying conservatism and religion (not by you, specifically) is a smear job to be honest. It instantly vilifies and polarizes the issues.
That smear job was pretty much perpetrated by Bush, wasn't it? And while religious people have been making trouble in the USA for ages, there was a time in recent history when they coexisted quite peaceably with everyone else. Many still do, but I'm sure one could make a case for politics polarising religion as easily as vice versa?
Good point about Roosevelt etc. I forgot about that. But yes, I assumed we're mostly discussing our impressions of the modern meanings of the monikers.
Anyway. I rant and procrastinate. Later!
I'm mostly immune--I use my car only when I really can't go by bike, and on many days I use the bus. Now law enforcement stands to lose out if we move towards responsible, sustainable transportation. Expect them to join the fight on the side of the bad guys...
15000 miles/year is not inflated in the west. Most people I know go significantly further. But let's work with that.
It is disingenuous to assume that gas is the only cost.
So work to make public transportation work better. It can, you know--Californians have a history of being the car (and tire) companies' bitches, but you could decide that you don't like being at their mercy all the time.
Yes, your situation is atrocious. But that's because everyone in your area has allowed it to become atrocious.
Furthermore, a California without an effective network of bike paths is truly an embarassment to humanity. The terrain in the densely populated areas is flat, the weather is perfect for 75% of all days even in the Bay Area let alone further south, and you have health and pollution crises unprecedented in human history. WTF??
I think you'll find that slurping is key.
Of course, coffee brewed at 100C tends to be bitter, but humans scald quickly around 55C, and most decent coffee is brewed somewhere between 80 and 94 degrees. The trick is knowing that some food is prepared too hot to consume. Duh.
For example, I'd laugh if McD's started serving pork that had never been brought above 55 degrees.
Forget decisions. The first step is filtering information, and it's obvious that the average bloke can't tell the difference between good science and industry propaganda. Not that the government has ever been very good about science either (even without the intellectual rape of the past 8 years), but at least Obama has good intentions in that respect.
I have the impression that "scientists" are, like everything else, viewed much like sports teams in this country. Nobody cares whether science is good or bad, and honestly most people don't even know that there is a way to tell truth from lies (after all, religions have claimed to be able to do that for centuries, and to the uneducated rednecks who make up 70% of our population the different claims to truth are indistinguishable). So for the non-scientist, you just pick your home team and you hope that it wins.