Second Opinion I would like a second opinion from another reviewer. I do not yet have a lot of experience as a reviewer, and this is my first review of a significant controversial article. On this subject, I am also personally biased against the claim of a link between vaccines containing Thiomersal and Autism, but I believe I am able to be objective.
I wouldn't want my son to get Mercury in his blood purposely. If science is so great, find another way and stop the studies (or continue for hobby). Tobacco was "perfectly safe" not just years, but for a large numbers of decades, research after research. Why are you so confident? Your opinions are partly responsible for damages EVEN if the studies you have access to right now say there is no harm from feeding mercury to babies.
I don't eat Tuna for that reason. And for the same reason I don't want Thimerasol. There's no safe dose. Just beasure the mercury level in the adult population. All my family (except me) had some eruptions, after drinking from an area that was naturally rich in Alu, and they detected not only high levels of Alu, but high levels of mercury as well. My father is 67...and had a lot of Tuna and vaccines in the past. So why accumulate to avoid a flu once in a while? I don't buy it, but that's just me.
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood. Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede. What makes you believe that mercury would be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation? Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever. It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
There should be an alternative to Vaccines. We are getting vaccines every year, and the numbers is steadily going up. I don't like injecting Mercury in my blood to avoid a flu once every few years.
Not a problem, you can require all schools accepting vouchers to be non profit organizations. I am not creating laws, I am writing on slashdot. Most of the impediments you can think of, are not really problems. Also, when you think of a public school, you are paying profit: a profit for the employees that are unionized, and profit for their providers. Many of the best teachers aren't even unionized.
Right now governments are trying to standardize education to limit political views so they can turn the world into a left wing demagogy. Universities in USA and around the world have become more and more dependent on public funds and this means freedom of inquiry will be stifled big time. Do you really think rich populists left wingers want any criticism of communism or protection for the poor?... This means universities will become hotbeds of communist demagogs and unchecked socialism propaganda and damn the scientific evidence. No thanks.
We could work out the details. Maybe low density populations get larger vouchers. Maybe they get the same vouchers, but low density = much cheaper (this is a universal truth). One of the problems why it doesn't happen is that this empowers diversity of thought, so education cannot be used to control society.
Not capitalism. Capitalism is about accumulation of capital and reinvestment. This is more politics, and a monopoly of these segments. Actually, teachers Unions across countries are one of the most powerful entities slowing down civilization, in the name of too many good things taken ransom by this group.
My solution is to give each student a voucher, and to employ free market regarding education. Not public schools, only public funding of education.
All the assumptions are wrong. There is no free market.
>Once government gets in the way
They are already in the way.
> So you just want people to hide their money?
The opposite. That's why I mentioned liquidity as a criteria. Hiding it under the bed is 100% liquidity. There's no such thing as hidden. You either spend it, invest it or save it. The mattress is the worst way to save, as for reactivating the economy depends ENTIRELY on the government spending for them, and that means either more debt or more taxes.
>Henry Ford hired enough workers to keep the assembly lines going, but he definitely could use thousands more people if he did NOT build the assembly lines.
I think I explained my point wrongly. Hiring for no sense is something governments like doing as it gets them votes, and no benefit to society (and some transfer that sometimes sets a bad precedent).
What I meant by create employment is really that they need to spend it, even to the point of becoming a bit less wealthy, or invest them at a risk. Do so, before the Government taxes them more. Today, we have companies that are solid and are becoming weaker just because they face raising interest rates. And at the same time, we (almost) have the lowest rates ever for Federal funds and bonds.
If you have too much money (personal wealth) and neither spend it, nor invest it (the less liquid the more useful), you should pay a lot more taxes. Society doesn't need you!
Ford did something very different. They created an incentive for everyone to work more. Everyone aspired a car. Cars became affordable. Cars became an american standard. I was reading the other day an anecdote of how Ford thought. He asked their engineers to invent a single block with 8 cillinders. Was told it was impossible. Told the engineers to figure it out by themselves. After a year, they came back, with no good news. He told them to keep thinking about it and to get it done. They did it. That was investing. And it paid not just for him, but for everyone. Imagine investments in making houses 50% cheaper to build. Imagine planes 705 more efficient and cheaper to construct. Imagine cheap electricity from fusion or other revolution in eolic or solar panels (or whatever). Imagine no gas needed after a new cell battery.
All this would affect the status quo. Today, we are fostering monopolies like the telcos, cartels like oil, syndicates like education, etc. They just destroy value, there is little innovation, and all our salaries buy so much less than many cannot even afford to pay a home loan.
That's why I say, stop protecting monopolies, safe bets, very liquid assets and even more extremely liquid assets (like cash equivalents, or using the mattress), especially if in the very wealthy populations.
Amazon: Hi, I'd like to enter into a contract to manufacture 10 million parts. Manufacturer: sure, let me look at my price list. It's going to cost you $10 per part. Amazon: I am getting a BETTER pricing? I think I am going to sell 15 million units in 18 months Manufacturer: no, because that would prevent interesting posts in slashdot. By the way, we leak all this info so that wannabe estimators can achieve 100% in their estimates. Sorry Amazon. Amazon: Ok, no worries.
That's probably not how it works. Amazon estimates the price across the device lifecycle (1 year at least and prices are constantly moving). They are very good at bargaining prices with the marketplace. They will sell more tablets than most other vendors (except for iPads) combined in the next couple of years. They are getting quotes now, as opposed to basing their pricing on unreliable, leaked info from tier 2 buyers (only Apple is a tier 1 buyer). For some components, the parts may be similar to computers, but for many, it wont.
So unless the person doing the estimates knows exactly the bargaining power of Amazon, how the deals are structured (does Amazon provide capital, advance cash, pricing terms), what are the counterparts (maybe a company is looking for volume that can drive up efficiencies in some areas where other have an edge so this volume becomes strategic),what are the margins for parts supplied, how is the cost of the supplier's of the manufacturer likely to evolve in a possible down economy, etc. then they will likely be off by +/- some very gentle % figure.
It's likely that Amazon will protect this market so vigorously (against Apple which threatened them with Book seller collusion - there's a trial for that, and their weight on the digital music/video market), against B&N (which is of much lesser concerns), against Google (who also wants to be world's checkout, Books middle-man and universal price finder (Google Shopping), against Netflix (yes, they want to own the Video delivery market, it just makes sense to their EC strategy) then yes, the Fire makes all sense, and buying Palm/WebOS is the next logical move).
I don't think they'll want to lose money, as that wouldn't help their stock. I'd say it's their #1 priority to sell as much as they can, and will bundle dozens of benefits to those buying the devices, as well as those owning their device. And if you root their machine, you lose many benefits. They also hedge the risk of Chrome becoming the the facto standard spy on everyone's doings, that is funding Google up and up.
Yes, that's a good tip. For now, I am using Firefox. Not perfect, but it does what I need. I don't like the new interface at all, it looks like Chrome, but moving to Chromium would not help much.
I think there's a simple solution. Make the wealthy responsible for employment. If employment goes below certain threshold, you start taxing their wealth progressively to the amount of risk they take.
I don't know the exact way, but the more you hoard and the safer you play it, the more you are accountable for. Eg.1. Take less risks (more liquid position, lower beta positions) such as "hold more cash", "hold more gold", hold more AAA bonds, and you are taxed very swiftly. Invest in start ups, venture capital, etc. and you'll get a larger break. Same with companies. Eg. 2. Invest in foreign assets, or have wealth that is concentrated abroad, you are taxed more. If they want to go live somewhere else, they lose all the protection the country provides.
>Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes.
Don't you see it's designed that way? Look at all the regulations, requirements, laws, jurisdictions, international treaties, federal, state, municipal/county and the many other different taxes and contexts, how the financial sector works (you have money, you get loans at 3%, you don't you get it at 20%), economies of scale (you have lots of money, you buy discounted wholesale, you don't you pay premium retail), lobby, protection, safeguards, visas, etc.
I don't have anything against being rich. But today, staying rich is much easier than becoming rich, and people that can't become rich, can't compete, and thus can't employ. So the SOLUTION is not to protect the rich, it's to make it easier to become rich, and make it easier to become poor. It's called fairness and mobility.
Typical end users love it. That's why it became the #2 browser in the world. They can't compete with Chrome promotion by the largest advertisement network in the world, plus all the partners bundling Chrome, plus all the devices using Android.
Updates flash automatically (great way to get malware), plus blundles Chrome with Flash updates if you are using another browser. I don't like the auto updates, nor the cheap trojan that Chrome has become.
I use Firefox for the same reasons people say they use Chrome. The other thing is that Firefox is about the SAME share as Chrome, without the past two years HEAVY promotion from the largest advertizement network in the world: Google itself.
I feel the complete BIAS of this thread's readers. You only get modded up if you talk nice about Chrome. I've uninstalled Chrome more times, from more PCs that I can remember. It's very hard not to support Chrome stas unless you are very vigilant.
>Being an agnostic in the way you describe is a cop-out. Of course we can't *know* there is no God, but that also means that we can't know that the world wasn't created last Tuesday in situ, or that the FSM didn't actually create the world, or that invisible pink unicorns don't live in my back yard, or that the world wasn't originally shat out the rear-end of a flying cosmic turtle. That way lies *madness*, where anything and everything is possible and unknowable.
This is exactly what science/cosmology brought us. The Big Bang does away with the conclusion BY SCIENTISTS that everything is a statistical fluke, that we go from order to entropy and that there's an arrow of time. It's a way for science to start believing beyond what the equations told us.
When I was an uneducated child I would look up use words in the wrong sense somehow, sometimes look for words in the dictionary, and just like people would read a newspaper, would believe it's true by virtue of being published. After being educated, I didn't need to look it up most of the times (I do know Latin as well). Then as I grew up and read more, I started seeing beyond the definitions and looked at how people used them. The words mean what people ultimately mean, regardless of the definition. That's why definitions have changes thousand of times, and are only modestly static for dead languages such a Hebrew, Latin (that are never used by the general population), etc.
Thanks for looking the definitions for me, Atheists have faith in superior beings or God not existing. The act of not believing only has that cause, a faith that can't be demonstrated by science as God is unprovable scientifically (so far).
>Yet you won't find even a hint of an oblique reference to anything that could possibly be mistraken for Jesus or the events of the Gospels.
I read Pistis Sophia based on the Dead See Scrolls, and there are indeed a lot of oblique and not so oblique references to Jesus, Mary and several Prophets there, along with their teaching. What parts did you read? There are a lot of contemporaries that do not mention Apolo, or Socrates. Did they not exist?
Agnostics think they can't prove it (now/ever), but they don't rule existance (because they already acknowledge one can't know, so they place it entirely in the real of Faith - it exists or it doesn't with equal probability) so it makes as much sense to believe that it makes to not believe. So it's not that choosing isn't valid, but that all positions must be respected but never enforced. Atheist have faith in the lack of God's existence and would love an atheist universe. Theists know (/believe they know) IT exists and many or most believe there is proof (personal, logical or even physical), and see benefit in a theist universe.
My favorite analogy (which i just made up) is thinking about luck. Does it exist? A scientist can point out to many scientifically challenged people that luck is about either preparation (he/she wasn't lucky, he/she knew better) and randomness (there is no preference at all in ANY outcome). A non prepared person may have faith in their chances without any logical basis for it. We can never know if there's any force influencing how dice are rolled - we just know that on average they conform to some rule. The reality is that we can never prove it (it would prove that Faith is physical in some way). So you must go with your hunch, not caring about proving it: yet, the act of thinking you are lucky has a profound implication in how the world influences you, and how you influence the world, with material changes. So the Agnostic would be the one that acts as if he/she believes in luck, but tries to rely as little as possible in it. More like someone that is a bit superstitious, but knowing it doesn't make any sense.
For me, I decided that Faith with 10 grains of salt to particular versions of religions, along with a genuine respect for non-believers is what suits my conscience best. So I am typically against radical theists and radical atheists, which behave as if they knew something even though they have no proof, trying to impose their ONE TRUTH.
Slashdot Mirror
Your super-source is not a good source...look at the Discussion page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Thiomersal_controversy
From the editor of the article...
Second Opinion
I would like a second opinion from another reviewer. I do not yet have a lot of experience as a reviewer, and this is my first review of a significant controversial article. On this subject, I am also personally biased against the claim of a link between vaccines containing Thiomersal and Autism, but I believe I am able to be objective.
I wouldn't want my son to get Mercury in his blood purposely. If science is so great, find another way and stop the studies (or continue for hobby). Tobacco was "perfectly safe" not just years, but for a large numbers of decades, research after research. Why are you so confident? Your opinions are partly responsible for damages EVEN if the studies you have access to right now say there is no harm from feeding mercury to babies.
I don't eat Tuna for that reason. And for the same reason I don't want Thimerasol. There's no safe dose. Just beasure the mercury level in the adult population. All my family (except me) had some eruptions, after drinking from an area that was naturally rich in Alu, and they detected not only high levels of Alu, but high levels of mercury as well. My father is 67...and had a lot of Tuna and vaccines in the past. So why accumulate to avoid a flu once in a while? I don't buy it, but that's just me.
IAMNAC....A lot of autism cases have been traced to use of Mercury in vaccines during early childhood. Since Mercury was retired from Baby/Toddlers, cases have started to recede. What makes you believe that mercury would be FORCIBLY injected in bloodstrems of our nation? Mercury makes you more stupid, doesn't have any benefit, stays in the bloodstream for ever. It's also been found that most people have more mercury in their blood than is normal, and today, many are even advising avoiding things like Tuna for this very same reason: the seas have more mercury floating, so fish that lives linger, accumulates more mercury. This is the reason many people look for Fish Oil supplements that have a process for removing most of the mercury, or look for produce from seas that don't (yet) suffer largerly from this problem.
There should be an alternative to Vaccines. We are getting vaccines every year, and the numbers is steadily going up. I don't like injecting Mercury in my blood to avoid a flu once every few years.
Not a problem, you can require all schools accepting vouchers to be non profit organizations. I am not creating laws, I am writing on slashdot. Most of the impediments you can think of, are not really problems. Also, when you think of a public school, you are paying profit: a profit for the employees that are unionized, and profit for their providers. Many of the best teachers aren't even unionized.
In practice, ISP are easily replaceable, Facebook is not.
Right now governments are trying to standardize education to limit political views so they can turn the world into a left wing demagogy. Universities in USA and around the world have become more and more dependent on public funds and this means freedom of inquiry will be stifled big time. Do you really think rich populists left wingers want any criticism of communism or protection for the poor? ... This means universities will become hotbeds of communist demagogs and unchecked socialism propaganda and damn the scientific evidence. No thanks.
We could work out the details. Maybe low density populations get larger vouchers. Maybe they get the same vouchers, but low density = much cheaper (this is a universal truth). One of the problems why it doesn't happen is that this empowers diversity of thought, so education cannot be used to control society.
Not capitalism. Capitalism is about accumulation of capital and reinvestment. This is more politics, and a monopoly of these segments. Actually, teachers Unions across countries are one of the most powerful entities slowing down civilization, in the name of too many good things taken ransom by this group.
My solution is to give each student a voucher, and to employ free market regarding education. Not public schools, only public funding of education.
All the assumptions are wrong. There is no free market.
>Once government gets in the way
They are already in the way.
> So you just want people to hide their money?
The opposite. That's why I mentioned liquidity as a criteria. Hiding it under the bed is 100% liquidity. There's no such thing as hidden. You either spend it, invest it or save it. The mattress is the worst way to save, as for reactivating the economy depends ENTIRELY on the government spending for them, and that means either more debt or more taxes.
>Henry Ford hired enough workers to keep the assembly lines going, but he definitely could use thousands more people if he did NOT build the assembly lines.
I think I explained my point wrongly. Hiring for no sense is something governments like doing as it gets them votes, and no benefit to society (and some transfer that sometimes sets a bad precedent).
What I meant by create employment is really that they need to spend it, even to the point of becoming a bit less wealthy, or invest them at a risk. Do so, before the Government taxes them more. Today, we have companies that are solid and are becoming weaker just because they face raising interest rates. And at the same time, we (almost) have the lowest rates ever for Federal funds and bonds.
If you have too much money (personal wealth) and neither spend it, nor invest it (the less liquid the more useful), you should pay a lot more taxes. Society doesn't need you!
Ford did something very different. They created an incentive for everyone to work more. Everyone aspired a car. Cars became affordable. Cars became an american standard. I was reading the other day an anecdote of how Ford thought. He asked their engineers to invent a single block with 8 cillinders. Was told it was impossible. Told the engineers to figure it out by themselves. After a year, they came back, with no good news. He told them to keep thinking about it and to get it done. They did it. That was investing. And it paid not just for him, but for everyone. Imagine investments in making houses 50% cheaper to build. Imagine planes 705 more efficient and cheaper to construct. Imagine cheap electricity from fusion or other revolution in eolic or solar panels (or whatever). Imagine no gas needed after a new cell battery.
All this would affect the status quo. Today, we are fostering monopolies like the telcos, cartels like oil, syndicates like education, etc. They just destroy value, there is little innovation, and all our salaries buy so much less than many cannot even afford to pay a home loan.
That's why I say, stop protecting monopolies, safe bets, very liquid assets and even more extremely liquid assets (like cash equivalents, or using the mattress), especially if in the very wealthy populations.
I guess Firefox is very complex in some ways. I think it might have crashed once in about two years for me. And use it everyday for 10 hours or more.
Amazon: Hi, I'd like to enter into a contract to manufacture 10 million parts.
Manufacturer: sure, let me look at my price list. It's going to cost you $10 per part.
Amazon: I am getting a BETTER pricing? I think I am going to sell 15 million units in 18 months
Manufacturer: no, because that would prevent interesting posts in slashdot. By the way, we leak all this info so that wannabe estimators can achieve 100% in their estimates. Sorry Amazon.
Amazon: Ok, no worries.
That's probably not how it works. Amazon estimates the price across the device lifecycle (1 year at least and prices are constantly moving). They are very good at bargaining prices with the marketplace. They will sell more tablets than most other vendors (except for iPads) combined in the next couple of years. They are getting quotes now, as opposed to basing their pricing on unreliable, leaked info from tier 2 buyers (only Apple is a tier 1 buyer). For some components, the parts may be similar to computers, but for many, it wont.
So unless the person doing the estimates knows exactly the bargaining power of Amazon, how the deals are structured (does Amazon provide capital, advance cash, pricing terms), what are the counterparts (maybe a company is looking for volume that can drive up efficiencies in some areas where other have an edge so this volume becomes strategic),what are the margins for parts supplied, how is the cost of the supplier's of the manufacturer likely to evolve in a possible down economy, etc. then they will likely be off by +/- some very gentle % figure.
It's likely that Amazon will protect this market so vigorously (against Apple which threatened them with Book seller collusion - there's a trial for that, and their weight on the digital music/video market), against B&N (which is of much lesser concerns), against Google (who also wants to be world's checkout, Books middle-man and universal price finder (Google Shopping), against Netflix (yes, they want to own the Video delivery market, it just makes sense to their EC strategy) then yes, the Fire makes all sense, and buying Palm/WebOS is the next logical move).
I don't think they'll want to lose money, as that wouldn't help their stock. I'd say it's their #1 priority to sell as much as they can, and will bundle dozens of benefits to those buying the devices, as well as those owning their device. And if you root their machine, you lose many benefits. They also hedge the risk of Chrome becoming the the facto standard spy on everyone's doings, that is funding Google up and up.
Who's this Norman? I really meant it.
Yes, that's a good tip. For now, I am using Firefox. Not perfect, but it does what I need. I don't like the new interface at all, it looks like Chrome, but moving to Chromium would not help much.
Likely, these people are killed not by what they did, but by what they know. But that's a guess and I wouldn't want to know the answer.
I think there's a simple solution. Make the wealthy responsible for employment. If employment goes below certain threshold, you start taxing their wealth progressively to the amount of risk they take.
I don't know the exact way, but the more you hoard and the safer you play it, the more you are accountable for.
Eg.1. Take less risks (more liquid position, lower beta positions) such as "hold more cash", "hold more gold", hold more AAA bonds, and you are taxed very swiftly. Invest in start ups, venture capital, etc. and you'll get a larger break. Same with companies.
Eg. 2. Invest in foreign assets, or have wealth that is concentrated abroad, you are taxed more. If they want to go live somewhere else, they lose all the protection the country provides.
>Of-course those who actually own businesses and create jobs (cliche, but then again, poor people don't create jobs), those who do create jobs already do more than their fair share before they pay 1 cent in taxes.
Don't you see it's designed that way? Look at all the regulations, requirements, laws, jurisdictions, international treaties, federal, state, municipal/county and the many other different taxes and contexts, how the financial sector works (you have money, you get loans at 3%, you don't you get it at 20%), economies of scale (you have lots of money, you buy discounted wholesale, you don't you pay premium retail), lobby, protection, safeguards, visas, etc.
I don't have anything against being rich. But today, staying rich is much easier than becoming rich, and people that can't become rich, can't compete, and thus can't employ. So the SOLUTION is not to protect the rich, it's to make it easier to become rich, and make it easier to become poor. It's called fairness and mobility.
She's not out of reach. You are not confident enough.
Typical end users love it. That's why it became the #2 browser in the world. They can't compete with Chrome promotion by the largest advertisement network in the world, plus all the partners bundling Chrome, plus all the devices using Android.
Updates flash automatically (great way to get malware), plus blundles Chrome with Flash updates if you are using another browser. I don't like the auto updates, nor the cheap trojan that Chrome has become.
I use Firefox for the same reasons people say they use Chrome. The other thing is that Firefox is about the SAME share as Chrome, without the past two years HEAVY promotion from the largest advertizement network in the world: Google itself.
I feel the complete BIAS of this thread's readers. You only get modded up if you talk nice about Chrome. I've uninstalled Chrome more times, from more PCs that I can remember. It's very hard not to support Chrome stas unless you are very vigilant.
>Being an agnostic in the way you describe is a cop-out. Of course we can't *know* there is no God, but that also means that we can't know that the world wasn't created last Tuesday in situ, or that the FSM didn't actually create the world, or that invisible pink unicorns don't live in my back yard, or that the world wasn't originally shat out the rear-end of a flying cosmic turtle. That way lies *madness*, where anything and everything is possible and unknowable.
This is exactly what science/cosmology brought us. The Big Bang does away with the conclusion BY SCIENTISTS that everything is a statistical fluke, that we go from order to entropy and that there's an arrow of time. It's a way for science to start believing beyond what the equations told us.
When I was an uneducated child I would look up use words in the wrong sense somehow, sometimes look for words in the dictionary, and just like people would read a newspaper, would believe it's true by virtue of being published. After being educated, I didn't need to look it up most of the times (I do know Latin as well). Then as I grew up and read more, I started seeing beyond the definitions and looked at how people used them. The words mean what people ultimately mean, regardless of the definition. That's why definitions have changes thousand of times, and are only modestly static for dead languages such a Hebrew, Latin (that are never used by the general population), etc.
Thanks for looking the definitions for me, Atheists have faith in superior beings or God not existing. The act of not believing only has that cause, a faith that can't be demonstrated by science as God is unprovable scientifically (so far).
I just checked and I am wrong. This was found on the Nag Hammadi library which was 15--300 after Christ :-)
>Yet you won't find even a hint of an oblique reference to anything that could possibly be mistraken for Jesus or the events of the Gospels.
I read Pistis Sophia based on the Dead See Scrolls, and there are indeed a lot of oblique and not so oblique references to Jesus, Mary and several Prophets there, along with their teaching. What parts did you read? There are a lot of contemporaries that do not mention Apolo, or Socrates. Did they not exist?
Here's my personal take.
Agnostics think they can't prove it (now/ever), but they don't rule existance (because they already acknowledge one can't know, so they place it entirely in the real of Faith - it exists or it doesn't with equal probability) so it makes as much sense to believe that it makes to not believe. So it's not that choosing isn't valid, but that all positions must be respected but never enforced. Atheist have faith in the lack of God's existence and would love an atheist universe. Theists know (/believe they know) IT exists and many or most believe there is proof (personal, logical or even physical), and see benefit in a theist universe.
My favorite analogy (which i just made up) is thinking about luck. Does it exist? A scientist can point out to many scientifically challenged people that luck is about either preparation (he/she wasn't lucky, he/she knew better) and randomness (there is no preference at all in ANY outcome). A non prepared person may have faith in their chances without any logical basis for it. We can never know if there's any force influencing how dice are rolled - we just know that on average they conform to some rule. The reality is that we can never prove it (it would prove that Faith is physical in some way). So you must go with your hunch, not caring about proving it: yet, the act of thinking you are lucky has a profound implication in how the world influences you, and how you influence the world, with material changes. So the Agnostic would be the one that acts as if he/she believes in luck, but tries to rely as little as possible in it. More like someone that is a bit superstitious, but knowing it doesn't make any sense.
For me, I decided that Faith with 10 grains of salt to particular versions of religions, along with a genuine respect for non-believers is what suits my conscience best. So I am typically against radical theists and radical atheists, which behave as if they knew something even though they have no proof, trying to impose their ONE TRUTH.