Actually, the judge found that the program violated:
-The Constitutional Seperation of Powers -The First Amendment -The Fourth Amendment -FISA -Title III (IIRC; but, in any case, the law covering surveience not covered by FISA) -And just for good measure, English Common Law
Refuting every single one of these will be difficult; expect appeals to focus on the State secrets priveledge or standing issues. The Judge shut the door pretty hard on the state secrets front, so I'm thinking the Administration will push on standing. Which is an awfully weasely argument, but I don't suppose that will stop them.
It's not an argument to beleive induction, it's an argument that you already do.
Science depends on induction. You can't prove (in a logical/mathematical sense) induction works, so you can't prove any scientific finding. Well, you couldn't anyway, for other reasons (Proving your senses reflect anything real in the first place for example), so the lack of proof for induction doesn't hurt there.
So the "problem" of induction is limited to this: You shouldn't beleive any scientific finding any more firmly than you beleive in induction. But this too is no big deal, because you, me, and everyone else who won't touch a hot stove beleive quite firmly in induction.
"I doubt that if Darwin had any inkling of the existence of things like DNA"
No need to doubt! It's quite clear Darwin absolutely had no idea of the existence of DNA, as it was not discovered until long after he died. Of course, his "garbage" theory predicted it's existence before that, but hey, that was probably just a lucky guess.
"Six centuries ago, the majority of Itallians believed the Earth was flat."
~600 years ago, and for quite a while before that, it was generally understood that the world was round. Columbus had this theory that it was a lot smaller than everyone else thought, but he was wrong.
"Guess what, science is not a democracy, voting agaist something matters shit."
In that case, you'd have good reason to attack, and I'd see particularly little reason to call it defending. You're going to destroy something 30 miles inside another country; how could that not be an attack?
If you feel you need to go into someone elses territory to destroy weapons they may use against you, then you feel defending will be insufficient, and you feel you need to attack them before they attack you.
You may even be right.
If you want to convince me you are right, you'll do better saying "We need to attack first because..." If you start by calling it "defensive", when it's clearly "offensive", then I'm going to be predisposed to assume the rest of your arguments are BS too.
Whose a pure pacifist? What if you're perfectly willing to fight for causes you feel justify it, but don't want others to make that decision for you? What if you think the militaries of the world today (orthose who control them) make incredibly stupid decisions as to when to fight, and you don't want your code to help them out, however slightly? It's a bit poseur-ly to it in your license; the military probably won't have any problem re-implementing if they want to; but hey, it's their code, why shouldn't they license it how they please?
Veganism is "unworkable in reality."? Um, in like, really-real reality, there are quite a few vegans, so WTF are you talking about?
"Being a Vegan is nice and sweet, but if it came down to starvation for you and your child vs eating Bambi, Bambi'd be on a stick"
So what? It doesn't come down to that. Why can't vegans decide not to eat animals, since it's not, in fact, Bambi or starvation? (FYI, I am not a vegan; venison is yummy) I can't see what you have against people being vegan who aren't facing starvation. ( Even in those parts of the world where people are facing starvation, your starve-or-eat-meat dilemma is particularly unlikely)
"If you want to die, or be a slave, by all means, refuse to fight."
If you really want to die, I'm pretty sure fighting when you don't need to is the way to go.
"We evolved to where we are by being agressive"
Evolution is not a moral code. A behaviour may have been produced by evolution, or have been and evolutionary advantage, but that just describes it, it doesn't justify it. For that matter, I do beleive we got where we are by using our brains and cooperating with one another. Were it all about being aggressive, lions would have kicked our asses.
Is the military force in question doing stuff inside their own territory or that of their allies? If so, they may be defending. If not, they're attacking. Feel free to argue they are justified in attacking, but if you're unwilling admit that's what your arguing, and must erroneously call it "defending", it implies you've got a weak case.
The "group will" is in this case, stupid. So as a member of the group, and as an individual being subjected to it's will, I will say it is stupid and complain about it. I do not beleive the fact I have the theoretical choice to not travel as part of that group invalidates my objections. People who like stupid regulations are also free to travel by other means.
While you may have been lucky so far, others certainly had multi-hour waits yesterday that no "strategy" could have avoided. Because they decided to ban things that were no more of a thret than they were a year ago, or will be a year from now, and no more of a threat than things they still allow.
It's not a matter of adjusting our definition. It's a matter of having one, which we don't.
Various people (not generally astronomers) want a strict, reasonable definition of "Planet", but find that these either exclude Pluto, or include a vast number of things no one would really consider a planet.
Astronomers generally don't care. They know Plutos properties, and don't use "planet" as a terribly specific term. This is purely a laymans controversy. It's significant only because something you learned in grade school was an over-simplification. Experts understand the details, and exactly which over-simplification is better is not very interesting to them.
But since I'm a layman, my 2 cents: Juptier and Earth aren't like each other. They also aren't like anything else in their repsective orbital neighborhoods. There's a whole lot of stuff that orbits the sun at roughly the same distance as Earth, and none of it is much like Earth. Ditto for Jupter and 6 other object whose names you know. There's a whole lot of stuff that orbits at similar distance as Pluto, and quite a bit of it is a lot like Pluto.
Somewhere in there is my own favorite over-simplification, which kicks out Pluto.
The times haven't changed. If you go into a job interview without much experience, then or now, someone might want to know about your education. Do you think Gates, Jobs or Dell got started in a job interview? As the interview-ee?
If you start your own company, who cares what's expected?
Is 92% "surprisingly accurate"? Only if Oscar winners are somewhat hard to pick, which they aren't. I'd bet I can pick more than half of the big categories correctly, despite never actually watching the movies; the surrounding hype is enough. Any competent film critic should achieve 90%.
The pyramid-building Old Kingdom had limited access to the outside world, and presumably few, if any, foriegn slaves. So the pyramid building workers were probably motivated chiefly by religious conviction. I'm not sure I'd agree with your "farmers in the off-season" classification. Indications seem to be that the society was well off enough to support dedicated pyramid-builders, and that these monuments were in fact collosal resource commitments. But basically, I second your note that the image of slaves being driven to build pyramids is modern falsehood.
But note that the article is discussing not the pyramids, but the tombs in the valley of the kings. These were built 500+ years later by the Middle Kingdom. Who did in fact conquer everyone anywhere near them and import large numbers of slaves (but not whole nations). So the artifacts that might exist in this possible tomb might be said to be the fruit of the labor of slaves moreso than the pyramids, to whatever extent it makes sense to apply modern understandings of "slave" and "religious follower" to Egypt 3 or 4 millenia ago.
Which I agree has little to do with weather such artifacts ought now be in museums versus the hands of grave robbers.
Well, I've got a deal for you that will help you out in just the same way those tax breaks did! Just let me take out a thousand dollar loan in your name, and I'll give you 100 bucks of it! What a deal!
BTW - You are either misrepresenting your tax picture, or filing in roughly the stupidest possible way. Then again, you claim to be a small business with a 4% margin, and you call that an improvement?
"And now that it is all over we can make a reasonably accurate guess why they stonewalled the turnover of Ms. Miller's records. Because they knew what was in her records, and therefore knew they wouldn't harm Chimpy; thus quietly turning them over would have brought the 'scandal' to an end a good year sooner and that wasn't in their interest."
Of course, the Bush administration knew what was in Ms. Millers records, and could have brought the whole thing to a close at any tinme with a five minute press conference.
We have two cases of reporters being asked to divulge sources, one where the Bush administration wants them to, one where it didn't. The NYT was against revealing sources in both cases.
A testament to the lax editorial standards at American Heritage I'd say. I suppose I've no problem with including it from an informational standpoint, but it at least deserves a note: "Usage: Stupid Biz-speak". Instead they further justify it by using it in their definition of the similarly moronic "incent".
These "words" are very recent additions to the English lexicon. They may stick around and become standard, or they may not. At present, a linguistic authority such as American Heritage ought to warn you that their usage will cause some fraction of listeners to consider you a twit.
It's not like these words are needed; there is no hole to be filled here. The verb English retains from the same Latin root as "incentive" is "enchant", which I rather like, but may be off point. "Entice" on the other hand, is a perfectly good word that already means what "incentivize" is trying to. For a bit of a different flavor, one might consider "incite".
This has been your daily dose of linguistic pedanticalizationariness. Thank you.
A random web page, now there's an authority! If it's on the Interweb, it must be true!
Let's see, if says an Alosaurus bone C-14 dated to 16,000 years, hence all scientific dating must be suspect and maybe the earth is only 6000 years old. OK, the logic isn't close to sound, but let's skip that. In any case it's lying right off the top: There are no allosaurus bones. Allosaurus is known only through fossils, in which the minerals in the bones got slowly replacedby minerals from the surrounding sediment. All the organic material is long gone. That is to say, there is no CARBON. Nobody ever carbon dated an allosaurus "bone". You can't carbon date rock.
I guess you guys pick on carbon dating because people have heard of it? But what's the point? If the idea is that god created the earth as-is 6000 years ago, with the (carbon free) dinosaur fossils in place, couldn't he have made the C-14/C-12 ratios of things that are actually carbon dateable anything he pleased? Why bother arguing so incompetently against carbon dating when your idea is consistent with it?
Creationists have been questioning carbon dating for a very long time despite being told what I'm about to tell you, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering, but on the off chance you care at all about knowing what you're talking about:
Carbon dating has dididly-squat to do with evolution. If you proved that carbon dating didn't work at all, even a little bit (which isn't the case) it would not impact the evidence for evolution in the least. The accuracy of carbon dating declines as the date you're measuring goes further into the past; while it is an excellent technology for the anthropologist studying hunter-gatherer tribes of a thousand years ago, it is completely useless for dating fossil remains anywhere close to old enough to be interesting in terms of evolution. The key point is: Everybody knows this; It is not news. The scientists who have studied evolution, and concluded it is correct, and built the entire modern science of biology atop it did not ever rely on carbon dating in that process.
Mentioning carbon dating in your questioning of evolution is a great way to flag yourself as someone who doesn't know what they are talking about, and probably knows it.
I took "it's all just a dream" to mean that what my senses report is not based on an actual reality outside myself. If we assume anything I perceive (you, for example) exists outside my head, then, by my terms, it is not all just a dream. My assumption, that reality exists, in no way assumes that I, or anyone, understand everything about it.
If the dream is all there is, it is not a dream; it is reality.
Buddhism is collection of beleifs based on "faith" and not sensory evidence. To the extent it claims that reality is non-objective, it is not consistent with relativity, quantum mechanics, or any other branch of physical science. I'm not even sure what it means to be "consistent" with mathematics/logic. "Not provably false" I suppose. Buddhism is, to me, the least annoying set of widely held faith-based beliefs I am aware of, and is practiced/beleived by several of the nicest people and most interesting people I know. But faith-based beleifs just aren't very interesting to me, other than from an anthropological angle.
You could exist in some reality you do not perceive, while dreaming of a fictional world so detailed that it "must be treated as real"...
Sounds to me like the extra, unpercieved reality adds complexity needlessly. Or to put it a different way, what's the practical difference between a dream that must be treated as real and in which "consequences" exist, and reality?
Sir Occam to the rescue! While I can never prove that it's not all just a dream, or created a moment ago, etc. I can logically prefer explanations that are simpler to more complex ones. So I can decide to beleive that the world really exists and is reflected with some degree of fidelity by my senses without resorting to wild guesses. Which is to say, I can beleive in science and hold it above beleifs that don't have logical and evidentary backing, without being a hypocrite. In fact, I think it unreasonable to call it "faith". Faith is beleif not justified by sensory evidence.
Gravity cannot be proven. For the reasons you discuss, nothing can be proven outside mathematics. Gravity is science to those who can observe a phenomenon, formulate a theory to explain it, and test that theory. It seems clear to me that this is within the mental capabilities of several types of ape, though only in a small fraction of human apes does the theory get particularly detailed.
It is "wise" to mod "informative" a post without information?
"The author is not a credible journalist."
Why? You say a "quick search" reveals this. How? I don't know if the guy is a decent journalist or not, but you have'nt provided any argument other than not liking what he has to report. He claims he interveiewed a bunch of Western Union employees and customers, and reports on this policy. Do you assert he is lying? Do you have any reference for someone claiming this is not Western Union policy? What information do you have for us besides the facts presented not fitting with your world view?
Oh, I see, this asking you to actually have some reason for your claims is all a leftist conspiracy. Reality has a well known liberal bias. Damn commie "facts".
You are correct that gas prices are not at their lowest point in decades; they are in fact, fairly high, though not up to their circa ~1981 peak. As far as adjusting for inflatione though, talking about prices without adjusting for inflation is just pointless.
But what I really wanted to respond to was: "Try living in so.cal...Sprawl and all... work is 60+miles away...2-3 hours..,"
So, move. The way so cal is set up, sprawl, the very idea of living so ridiculously far from where you go every day... these are the societal choices the parent asserts will change when gas gets expensive enough. For me, spending a couple hours a day in a car is untihinkable enough on it's own. The parent thinks a 5-7 dollar per gallon price will make people not want to live in sprawling burbs and commute to work. I don't know if that's the price, but clearly, at some point the cost of getting to work eats up enough of your earnings that it's not economically feasible.
Many Americans live somewhere that you have to drive to go absolutely anywhere, and you have to drive a long way, every single day, to get to your job. For some reason, they think this is not only reasonable, but natural and even when considering possible ways they might have to adapt to a gas crisis, moving doesn't even occur to them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Of Time and Space and Other Things"
Which was a collection of essays on various interesting science stuff, though I don't know if any of it was published seperately.
Actually, the judge found that the program violated:
-The Constitutional Seperation of Powers
-The First Amendment
-The Fourth Amendment
-FISA
-Title III (IIRC; but, in any case, the law covering surveience not covered by FISA)
-And just for good measure, English Common Law
Refuting every single one of these will be difficult; expect appeals to focus on the State secrets priveledge or standing issues. The Judge shut the door pretty hard on the state secrets front, so I'm thinking the Administration will push on standing. Which is an awfully weasely argument, but I don't suppose that will stop them.
It's not an argument to beleive induction, it's an argument that you already do.
Science depends on induction. You can't prove (in a logical/mathematical sense) induction works, so you can't prove any scientific finding. Well, you couldn't anyway, for other reasons (Proving your senses reflect anything real in the first place for example), so the lack of proof for induction doesn't hurt there.
So the "problem" of induction is limited to this: You shouldn't beleive any scientific finding any more firmly than you beleive in induction. But this too is no big deal, because you, me, and everyone else who won't touch a hot stove beleive quite firmly in induction.
"I doubt that if Darwin had any inkling of the existence of things like DNA"
No need to doubt! It's quite clear Darwin absolutely had no idea of the existence of DNA, as it was not discovered until long after he died. Of course, his "garbage" theory predicted it's existence before that, but hey, that was probably just a lucky guess.
"Six centuries ago, the majority of Itallians believed the Earth was flat."
~600 years ago, and for quite a while before that, it was generally understood that the world was round. Columbus had this theory that it was a lot smaller than everyone else thought, but he was wrong.
"Guess what, science is not a democracy, voting agaist something matters shit."
Right on.
In that case, you'd have good reason to attack, and I'd see particularly little reason to call it defending. You're going to destroy something 30 miles inside another country; how could that not be an attack?
If you feel you need to go into someone elses territory to destroy weapons they may use against you, then you feel defending will be insufficient, and you feel you need to attack them before they attack you.
You may even be right.
If you want to convince me you are right, you'll do better saying "We need to attack first because..." If you start by calling it "defensive", when it's clearly "offensive", then I'm going to be predisposed to assume the rest of your arguments are BS too.
Whose a pure pacifist? What if you're perfectly willing to fight for causes you feel justify it, but don't want others to make that decision for you? What if you think the militaries of the world today (orthose who control them) make incredibly stupid decisions as to when to fight, and you don't want your code to help them out, however slightly? It's a bit poseur-ly to it in your license; the military probably won't have any problem re-implementing if they want to; but hey, it's their code, why shouldn't they license it how they please?
Veganism is "unworkable in reality."? Um, in like, really-real reality, there are quite a few vegans, so WTF are you talking about?
"Being a Vegan is nice and sweet, but if it came down to starvation for you and your child vs eating Bambi, Bambi'd be on a stick"
So what? It doesn't come down to that. Why can't vegans decide not to eat animals, since it's not, in fact, Bambi or starvation? (FYI, I am not a vegan; venison is yummy) I can't see what you have against people being vegan who aren't facing starvation. ( Even in those parts of the world where people are facing starvation, your starve-or-eat-meat dilemma is particularly unlikely)
"If you want to die, or be a slave, by all means, refuse to fight."
If you really want to die, I'm pretty sure fighting when you don't need to is the way to go.
"We evolved to where we are by being agressive"
Evolution is not a moral code. A behaviour may have been produced by evolution, or have been and evolutionary advantage, but that just describes it, it doesn't justify it. For that matter, I do beleive we got where we are by using our brains and cooperating with one another. Were it all about being aggressive, lions would have kicked our asses.
Is the military force in question doing stuff inside their own territory or that of their allies? If so, they may be defending. If not, they're attacking. Feel free to argue they are justified in attacking, but if you're unwilling admit that's what your arguing, and must erroneously call it "defending", it implies you've got a weak case.
The "group will" is in this case, stupid. So as a member of the group, and as an individual being subjected to it's will, I will say it is stupid and complain about it. I do not beleive the fact I have the theoretical choice to not travel as part of that group invalidates my objections. People who like stupid regulations are also free to travel by other means.
While you may have been lucky so far, others certainly had multi-hour waits yesterday that no "strategy" could have avoided. Because they decided to ban things that were no more of a thret than they were a year ago, or will be a year from now, and no more of a threat than things they still allow.
It's not a matter of adjusting our definition. It's a matter of having one, which we don't.
Various people (not generally astronomers) want a strict, reasonable definition of "Planet", but find that these either exclude Pluto, or include a vast number of things no one would really consider a planet.
Astronomers generally don't care. They know Plutos properties, and don't use "planet" as a terribly specific term. This is purely a laymans controversy. It's significant only because something you learned in grade school was an over-simplification. Experts understand the details, and exactly which over-simplification is better is not very interesting to them.
But since I'm a layman, my 2 cents:
Juptier and Earth aren't like each other. They also aren't like anything else in their repsective orbital neighborhoods. There's a whole lot of stuff that orbits the sun at roughly the same distance as Earth, and none of it is much like Earth. Ditto for Jupter and 6 other object whose names you know. There's a whole lot of stuff that orbits at similar distance as Pluto, and quite a bit of it is a lot like Pluto.
Somewhere in there is my own favorite over-simplification, which kicks out Pluto.
The times haven't changed. If you go into a job interview without much experience, then or now, someone might want to know about your education. Do you think Gates, Jobs or Dell got started in a job interview? As the interview-ee?
If you start your own company, who cares what's expected?
Is 92% "surprisingly accurate"? Only if Oscar winners are somewhat hard to pick, which they aren't. I'd bet I can pick more than half of the big categories correctly, despite never actually watching the movies; the surrounding hype is enough. Any competent film critic should achieve 90%.
The pyramid-building Old Kingdom had limited access to the outside world, and presumably few, if any, foriegn slaves. So the pyramid building workers were probably motivated chiefly by religious conviction. I'm not sure I'd agree with your "farmers in the off-season" classification. Indications seem to be that the society was well off enough to support dedicated pyramid-builders, and that these monuments were in fact collosal resource commitments. But basically, I second your note that the image of slaves being driven to build pyramids is modern falsehood.
But note that the article is discussing not the pyramids, but the tombs in the valley of the kings. These were built 500+ years later by the Middle Kingdom. Who did in fact conquer everyone anywhere near them and import large numbers of slaves (but not whole nations). So the artifacts that might exist in this possible tomb might be said to be the fruit of the labor of slaves moreso than the pyramids, to whatever extent it makes sense to apply modern understandings of "slave" and "religious follower" to Egypt 3 or 4 millenia ago.
Which I agree has little to do with weather such artifacts ought now be in museums versus the hands of grave robbers.
Well, I've got a deal for you that will help you out in just the same way those tax breaks did! Just let me take out a thousand dollar loan in your name, and I'll give you 100 bucks of it! What a deal!
BTW - You are either misrepresenting your tax picture, or filing in roughly the stupidest possible way. Then again, you claim to be a small business with a 4% margin, and you call that an improvement?
"And now that it is all over we can make a reasonably accurate guess why they stonewalled the turnover of Ms. Miller's records. Because they knew what was in her records, and therefore knew they wouldn't harm Chimpy; thus quietly turning them over would have brought the 'scandal' to an end a good year sooner and that wasn't in their interest."
Of course, the Bush administration knew what was in Ms. Millers records, and could have brought the whole thing to a close at any tinme with a five minute press conference.
What are you talking about?
We have two cases of reporters being asked to divulge sources, one where the Bush administration wants them to, one where it didn't. The NYT was against revealing sources in both cases.
A testament to the lax editorial standards at American Heritage I'd say. I suppose I've no problem with including it from an informational standpoint, but it at least deserves a note: "Usage: Stupid Biz-speak". Instead they further justify it by using it in their definition of the similarly moronic "incent".
These "words" are very recent additions to the English lexicon. They may stick around and become standard, or they may not. At present, a linguistic authority such as American Heritage ought to warn you that their usage will cause some fraction of listeners to consider you a twit.
It's not like these words are needed; there is no hole to be filled here. The verb English retains from the same Latin root as "incentive" is "enchant", which I rather like, but may be off point. "Entice" on the other hand, is a perfectly good word that already means what "incentivize" is trying to. For a bit of a different flavor, one might consider "incite".
This has been your daily dose of linguistic pedanticalizationariness. Thank you.
A random web page, now there's an authority! If it's on the Interweb, it must be true!
Let's see, if says an Alosaurus bone C-14 dated to 16,000 years, hence all scientific dating must be suspect and maybe the earth is only 6000 years old. OK, the logic isn't close to sound, but let's skip that. In any case it's lying right off the top: There are no allosaurus bones. Allosaurus is known only through fossils, in which the minerals in the bones got slowly replacedby minerals from the surrounding sediment. All the organic material is long gone. That is to say, there is no CARBON. Nobody ever carbon dated an allosaurus "bone". You can't carbon date rock.
I guess you guys pick on carbon dating because people have heard of it? But what's the point? If the idea is that god created the earth as-is 6000 years ago, with the (carbon free) dinosaur fossils in place, couldn't he have made the C-14/C-12 ratios of things that are actually carbon dateable anything he pleased? Why bother arguing so incompetently against carbon dating when your idea is consistent with it?
Creationists have been questioning carbon dating for a very long time despite being told what I'm about to tell you, so I'm not sure why I'm bothering, but on the off chance you care at all about knowing what you're talking about:
Carbon dating has dididly-squat to do with evolution. If you proved that carbon dating didn't work at all, even a little bit (which isn't the case) it would not impact the evidence for evolution in the least. The accuracy of carbon dating declines as the date you're measuring goes further into the past; while it is an excellent technology for the anthropologist studying hunter-gatherer tribes of a thousand years ago, it is completely useless for dating fossil remains anywhere close to old enough to be interesting in terms of evolution. The key point is: Everybody knows this; It is not news. The scientists who have studied evolution, and concluded it is correct, and built the entire modern science of biology atop it did not ever rely on carbon dating in that process.
Mentioning carbon dating in your questioning of evolution is a great way to flag yourself as someone who doesn't know what they are talking about, and probably knows it.
I took "it's all just a dream" to mean that what my senses report is not based on an actual reality outside myself. If we assume anything I perceive (you, for example) exists outside my head, then, by my terms, it is not all just a dream. My assumption, that reality exists, in no way assumes that I, or anyone, understand everything about it.
If the dream is all there is, it is not a dream; it is reality.
Buddhism is collection of beleifs based on "faith" and not sensory evidence. To the extent it claims that reality is non-objective, it is not consistent with relativity, quantum mechanics, or any other branch of physical science. I'm not even sure what it means to be "consistent" with mathematics/logic. "Not provably false" I suppose. Buddhism is, to me, the least annoying set of widely held faith-based beliefs I am aware of, and is practiced/beleived by several of the nicest people and most interesting people I know. But faith-based beleifs just aren't very interesting to me, other than from an anthropological angle.
You could exist in some reality you do not perceive, while dreaming of a fictional world so detailed that it "must be treated as real"...
Sounds to me like the extra, unpercieved reality adds complexity needlessly. Or to put it a different way, what's the practical difference between a dream that must be treated as real and in which "consequences" exist, and reality?
Sir Occam to the rescue! While I can never prove that it's not all just a dream, or created a moment ago, etc. I can logically prefer explanations that are simpler to more complex ones. So I can decide to beleive that the world really exists and is reflected with some degree of fidelity by my senses without resorting to wild guesses. Which is to say, I can beleive in science and hold it above beleifs that don't have logical and evidentary backing, without being a hypocrite. In fact, I think it unreasonable to call it "faith". Faith is beleif not justified by sensory evidence.
Gravity cannot be proven. For the reasons you discuss, nothing can be proven outside mathematics. Gravity is science to those who can observe a phenomenon, formulate a theory to explain it, and test that theory. It seems clear to me that this is within the mental capabilities of several types of ape, though only in a small fraction of human apes does the theory get particularly detailed.
"The first readers wisely modded it up."
It is "wise" to mod "informative" a post without information?
"The author is not a credible journalist."
Why? You say a "quick search" reveals this. How? I don't know if the guy is a decent journalist or not, but you have'nt provided any argument other than not liking what he has to report. He claims he interveiewed a bunch of Western Union employees and customers, and reports on this policy. Do you assert he is lying? Do you have any reference for someone claiming this is not Western Union policy? What information do you have for us besides the facts presented not fitting with your world view?
Oh, I see, this asking you to actually have some reason for your claims is all a leftist conspiracy. Reality has a well known liberal bias. Damn commie "facts".
You are correct that gas prices are not at their lowest point in decades; they are in fact, fairly high, though not up to their circa ~1981 peak. As far as adjusting for inflatione though, talking about prices without adjusting for inflation is just pointless.
But what I really wanted to respond to was:
"Try living in so.cal...Sprawl and all... work is 60+miles away...2-3 hours..,"
So, move. The way so cal is set up, sprawl, the very idea of living so ridiculously far from where you go every day... these are the societal choices the parent asserts will change when gas gets expensive enough. For me, spending a couple hours a day in a car is untihinkable enough on it's own. The parent thinks a 5-7 dollar per gallon price will make people not want to live in sprawling burbs and commute to work. I don't know if that's the price, but clearly, at some point the cost of getting to work eats up enough of your earnings that it's not economically feasible.
Many Americans live somewhere that you have to drive to go absolutely anywhere, and you have to drive a long way, every single day, to get to your job. For some reason, they think this is not only reasonable, but natural and even when considering possible ways they might have to adapt to a gas crisis, moving doesn't even occur to them.