Re:many people learn best hands on not in classroo
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MOOC Mania
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· Score: 1
I agree with a lot of what you said - an apprentice-type system is really needed for a lot of jobs. However while a degree is not real-world training and may not be essentially for many jobs it does add something worthwhile while can be useful in _some_ jobs. For example in our last IT hire we took the person with the CS degree plus experience over the person with only experience (but more of it) simply because a degree provides a broader educational base so that, when confronted by some new problem, that person has knowledge that you cannot gain from experience alone. A good example of this is medicine where doctors need to learn about rarer conditions where the experience of seeing a patient with that condition may not be possible.
The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil...
All true but my point was simply that if you are going to claim the near extinction of coffee you had better have done your homework first and confirmed that no other areas will become viable for coffee plantations due to climate change. Failing to do something obvious like that means that your claims will look foolish and premature.
But it sounds like this is only a problem for some variants of supersymmetry:
Yes and no.
Actually just 'yes'. SUSY is essentially a mirror image of the Standard Model about which we know very little indeed (only limitations on it). Hence the best models assume nothing which is not expressly forbidden and so we end up with ~120 free parameters vs the 25 free parameters for the Standard Model which we have measured and so excluded many of the possibilities. For example the we set the mass of a photon and a gluon to zero in the Standard Model because we have no evidence that they have a mass and the Lagrangian requires zero mass for it to have the correct symmetries. However in fact all we can do is put an upper limit on the mass from experiment: this is a better example of the illustration you are trying to make.
The Standard Model already heavily suppresses Bs->mumu decay all this has shown is that SUSY, if it exists, likewise heavily suppresses it. This is a very interesting result but, far from falsifying SUSY, it just means that SUSY is perhaps more like the Standard Model than we think it needs to be. Since we have no clue about how Supersymmetry is broken this is not too surprising...so I'd say it's very interesting and certainly constrains SUSY but it is by no means its death knell. Indeed arguments about excluding phase space and so therefore making a theory less probably are somewhat akin to arguing that choosing the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 in a lottery is stupid because they will never come up. If SUSY is there nature has chosen one set of parameters for it and, if that happens to be the last place we look it is the last place we'll find it. However if we find no hints of SUSY particles at the LHC once we run with a higher energy (March 2015) then it will start to be in trouble because at that point it becomes a less likely solution to the problem it was actually invented to explain: why is the Higgs mass so much less than the energy scale of gravity?
I think it's an unjust law -- I believe in free speech -- but it's the police's job to uphold the law as it's written, not how it *should* be written.
How about the police upholding the European Convention on human rights which IIRC sits above UK law. Article 10 grants freedom of expression except in limited, and sensible circumstances and "insulting someone else" is not one of those. In fact if this law really is as written MPs had better watch what they say outside of the commons because they seem to spend a good deal of their time being insulting and attempting to cause MPs in other parties distress.
The ironic thing is that these same human rights laws that technically make his arrest illegal are also probably what caused it in the first place. It used to be that odious idiots who did things like burn remembrance poppies would find themselves ostracized from society to some degree which seems a very appropriate response. However that is now illegal under all these human rights laws because it is illegal to discriminate due to political beliefs. While it is very clear that things beyond our control such as gender, race, sexual preference etc. should be protected it is less clear to me that political beliefs should be protected since this is a conscience choice and so is under the full control of the individual and e.g. withholding services, insults (within reason and without threats of physical harm) etc. seems to me to be a legitimate way to make an argument against a particular political choice - certainly it is far better than locking people up!
Re:many people learn best hands on not in classroo
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MOOC Mania
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· Score: 1
many people also learn best hands on not in a pure classroom or a classroom with loads of theory and very little hands on.
True but then university is not really designed for these people. If you want to learn hands-on skills then there are vocational training colleges which will do this far better than a university and which have better connections with the industries that you will likely end up working in. These also typically have instructors with practical experience.
The problem with modern society is that we have achieved a very worthwhile goal that just about anyone can go to university if they work hard and want to. However what we have failed to do is educate people about whether they _should_ go. Indeed it seems to have become the default position that as long as you can make the entrance requirements you should go regardless of whether that is the sensible thing to do given your intended career choice.
No, even in a representative democracy the idea is that your representative is supposed to exercise their powers for the wishes of the electorate.
If that were the case why doesn't everyone have a system like Switzerland where the population has to vote on most issues? In fact with modern technology we could probably come up with a system where the population get to decide just about everything.
I would argue that the reason almost nobody has such a system is because, while it would exactly mirror what people want, it would not represent their best interests. Hence we have a system of choosing who will govern us and those people are supposed to act in our best interests but NOT give us exactly what we want. This is also why there are competing political parties: each has its own view about what our best interests are. If it was simply a case of doing what everyone wanted why would you need different ideologies?
One of the things that the article does not seem to mention is any study of areas which will become suitable for growing Arabica beans. All they seem to study are the existing locations. As the climate shifts new areas will open up. For example vineyards are becoming more feasible in the south of England due to climate change. So before I'll believe that coffee is endangered I'd want to see a study confirming that there will be no new areas that are becoming more suitable for coffee growing.
A good scientist is unlikely to be able to turn off his knowledge and intellect and serve the peoples will, and instead would want to enact laws and projects that actually worked and were based on facts and truth.
I'd argue that this is the definition of a good politician: one who acts in the best interests of the people even if is not exactly what they say they want. While I would agree with your description of a typical politician as a demagogue with mediation skills that does not make the typical politician a good politician.
I work in the game industry.....Believe in it as magic budget-saving pixie dust if you like.
Braben works in the industry too. Given that he has co-authored what I would claim is probably the best game ever produced (in comparison to its contemporaries) and given the expensive, DRM-laden rubbish that the majority of the games industry is pumping out at the moment I'll go with Braben's opinion. Afterall he has done it multiple times before so, in a balance of probabilities I'd give him the edge over an AC who works in an industry that does not seem to use procedural generation much, if at all.
£1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development.
If you read the proposal it explains how: procedural generation. This is the same technique which allowed the original Elite game managed to pack 8 Galaxies each with 255 planets into a BBC Micro which had 32Kb of memory - it used the random number generator with seeds to create reproducible sequences of numbers. I understood that this was also why it took so long before Elite was ported to other platforms: they had to reverse engineer the Beeb's random number generator first!
No, intelligence. We have learnt that small cats are not to be feared and can be useful so people have learnt to accept them. To be certain you'd need to do studies to confirm whether people can learn to like cats. If people can learn to like - or accept - cats then your argument for evolution immediately goes away since evolution would not be able to distinguish between those people who favoured cats by natural inclination vs. those who realized they were useful and so kept them despite not having a natural inclination for them. Hence, if we assume that someone can learn to accept cats, then either intelligence was the only factor or if evolution played a role then cat-lovers should be less intelligent on average compared to those who don't like cats because even "stupid" cat-lovers would still have cats and survive.
Sports themselves have deleterious long term effects.
So does living - we are talking here about a comparison. Taking drugs will introduce additional, unknown risks whether or not the sport is inherently dangerous.
Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily.
True, but that support is free and aimed at the professor so that they will choose a particular book. This is part of the reason why textbook costs have managed to spiral out of control: those making the decision about which book to use do not pay the financial cost. It is only in recent years that the costs have got so large that us profs have finally started to notice and will quiz the publishers about the cost. However we often find that the cost differences are so small that it makes little difference which text we go with.
The difference is that, when asked if you point out the security camera and say what's the difference the person will be made to think and, even if they disagree, will at least realize that you are making a point (in a very thought provoking way IMHO). Whereas if you refuse to say why you are taking the video they are more likely to think that you are an annoying idiot and not notice the surveillance camera since, afterall, they are already ignoring it. So really it boils down to whether you are trying to make a point in a clever way or just being an annoying idiot.
Actually it is more like harassment without any point. If he was trying to prove a point when asked "why are you videoing me?" he would explain that he is behaving just like a security camera and, since people accept that, why not this? Of course that is not quite true since security cameras do not usually record audio and some of the places he filmed were private where you would not expect cameras. In most of the cases he seems to just respond with a "I'm taking a video" which is no explanation at all.
Smart phones are usually heavily subsidised by the carriers who make their money back via overcharging on the monthly service fee which is why they appear far more affordable than otherwise. However an unlocked iPhone 5 is still half the price of the hearing aid prices quoted and has more features but then it is considerably larger than a hearing aid and the battery does not last as long. So it depends - how much does miniaturisation cost?
Can't speak for Americans as I'm English but we are certainly not getting smarter.
Having grown up in the UK, lived in the US for a few years and now settled in Canada and working in a University I would claim that students are becoming less educated at least on arrival at university. This makes it far harder to determine whether their intelligence has changed. For example in the UK we used to learn simple calculus by the age of 16 for O'level maths. In Canada many students starting university even to do physics or maths have never seen any calculus. This is not because they are less intelligent but simply because they are less educated. Indeed they pick it up fast enough once they are taught it but of course the time spent teaching them this is now not available to teach them more advanced topics at the end of their degree.
At the same time, while I have no confidence at all that IQ really measures intelligence (just look at MENSA), it is interesting that IQ scores are rising given that it is a fixed measure of some mental capability. What this suggests is that we are doubly failing the next generation: school standards are dropping while students are becoming more capable of learning!
I was under the impression that the 100 foot radius (in California--Ianal) was created to prevent campaigners from trying to sway voters to their side
In which case surely the law should be "no campaigning" within ~30m of a polling station. Since official observers are not campaigning this would not apply to them. If the Texas law really applies to "anyone who participates in Texas elections" then it must presumably have numerous exemptions so that the candidates get to vote, the election staff can vote and so the election staff running the station can be there to run it. Seems amazingly complicated if all you want to do is ban campaigning.
If that's what the law states, then I'm glad the Texas AG is doing his job and upholding it since that the law that the democratically elected legislature passed.
Ah - but if they ban international, UN-sanctioned observers from monitoring the election how can anyone have confidence that they are "democratically elected" as you claim? Afterall in the aftermath of the 2000 US presidential election one of your former presidents, Carter, claimed that the US presidential election rules would not satisfy the current UN rules for a true democracy and continues to criticise the way the US holds elections even today. So if your former leaders are not convinced by the process why should the rest of us have any confidence in it if you refuse to let anyone observe it?
Unless you have the ability to predict the future that will never be a real choice. What you are offering is a pill to make you smart and then kill you. You might make no significant breakthrough - unlike Hollywood in real life simply being smart is not enough - otherwise the first thing I would do after taking the pill is figure out a way to overcome the fatal side effects of taking the pill.
Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation.
True but the environment that they have optimised us for is the one that we were in during the Stone Age. Evolution is great at optimising but very slow to adapt to changes which is why we are so successful as a species: our intelligence lets us adapt far faster than evolution.
That being said, while I have no objection in principle to intelligence enhancing medication, in reality the problem is that while the short term effects can be easily determined the long term effects are far harder to figure out. So, just like sport, you do not want to end up with people being forced to take drugs to compete which may have deleterious long term effects.
I don't think living in a poor country is a fate worse than death. Being physically and mentally abused to death is far worse than being aborted.
Ignoring the point that until you are dead how would you know what is worse, many poor countries are poor for a reason beyond just not having resources. Lookup some of the recent African conflicts involving child soldiers, rape gangs, genocide and other horrors: I'm not convinced that being born to poor, ignorant, uncaring parents is going to be worse than what some people in Africa have had to endure.
Not a bad idea if it wasn't terribly expensive and a more invasive procedure with more risks to the mother. Do you want to impose the costs of a 3 or 4 month NICU stay on the victim of rape or poverty or should society just foot that bill?
Yes, the expense is a valid point but it's only more invasive if the mother leaves it until late in the pregnancy so arguably that would be her choice. However you would obviously want exceptions for circumstances outside the mother's control such as rape, incest and medical conditions.
I don't want to pay the taxes required to raise unwanted 6-month gestation children and I don't particularly want fetuses to be aborted.
I completely agree. The problem with your suggested planning solution though is what do you do with people who ignore it? Throwing them in gaol or applying large fines will just mean that taxpayers end up footing the bill for the child so you are back to where you started...with the additional costs of such a program.
Fine, when you are pregnant, you can believe that. Just keep it to yourself.
First you completely miss the rest of the post which, starting with that position points out a contradiction in the pro-lifer position: treating a fetus as a person does not mean that a woman should be required to carry it to term. Second to say that only pregnant people should have an opinion on abortion is an interesting position to take given that it takes two people to get pregnant and, as a father, I would argue that while the mother should have an absolute say over her own body, the fetus is not part of her body but a combination of two people both of whose opinions should be equally valid in regard to its treatment. Hence the argument that the mother should be allowed to terminate her life support services when she wants but that the fetus should be given a chance of survival on its own.
What is the essential moral difference between killing someone outright and giving them a minute chance of living?
There is a huge difference. In one case you are deliberately terminating life in the case in point you are simply saying that it is up to each individual to sustain their own life with medical assistance. It is true that this might mean a minute chance of living but the same can be said of, for example, someone who needs a liver transplant. In such a case would you advocate that a suitable donor be required to surrender a portion of their liver or would you regard it as their choice even though saying no might mean there is only a minute chance of the other surviving?
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I agree with a lot of what you said - an apprentice-type system is really needed for a lot of jobs. However while a degree is not real-world training and may not be essentially for many jobs it does add something worthwhile while can be useful in _some_ jobs. For example in our last IT hire we took the person with the CS degree plus experience over the person with only experience (but more of it) simply because a degree provides a broader educational base so that, when confronted by some new problem, that person has knowledge that you cannot gain from experience alone. A good example of this is medicine where doctors need to learn about rarer conditions where the experience of seeing a patient with that condition may not be possible.
The fact that regions north or south of existing regions may open up as viable climates doesn't mean that they will become home to new coffee plantations. Differences in soil...
All true but my point was simply that if you are going to claim the near extinction of coffee you had better have done your homework first and confirmed that no other areas will become viable for coffee plantations due to climate change. Failing to do something obvious like that means that your claims will look foolish and premature.
What are you, Canadian?
No, but I live there and I am in the process of becoming one. Clearly it seems to be working! ;-)
But it sounds like this is only a problem for some variants of supersymmetry:
Yes and no.
Actually just 'yes'. SUSY is essentially a mirror image of the Standard Model about which we know very little indeed (only limitations on it). Hence the best models assume nothing which is not expressly forbidden and so we end up with ~120 free parameters vs the 25 free parameters for the Standard Model which we have measured and so excluded many of the possibilities. For example the we set the mass of a photon and a gluon to zero in the Standard Model because we have no evidence that they have a mass and the Lagrangian requires zero mass for it to have the correct symmetries. However in fact all we can do is put an upper limit on the mass from experiment: this is a better example of the illustration you are trying to make.
The Standard Model already heavily suppresses Bs->mumu decay all this has shown is that SUSY, if it exists, likewise heavily suppresses it. This is a very interesting result but, far from falsifying SUSY, it just means that SUSY is perhaps more like the Standard Model than we think it needs to be. Since we have no clue about how Supersymmetry is broken this is not too surprising...so I'd say it's very interesting and certainly constrains SUSY but it is by no means its death knell. Indeed arguments about excluding phase space and so therefore making a theory less probably are somewhat akin to arguing that choosing the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6 in a lottery is stupid because they will never come up. If SUSY is there nature has chosen one set of parameters for it and, if that happens to be the last place we look it is the last place we'll find it. However if we find no hints of SUSY particles at the LHC once we run with a higher energy (March 2015) then it will start to be in trouble because at that point it becomes a less likely solution to the problem it was actually invented to explain: why is the Higgs mass so much less than the energy scale of gravity?
I think it's an unjust law -- I believe in free speech -- but it's the police's job to uphold the law as it's written, not how it *should* be written.
How about the police upholding the European Convention on human rights which IIRC sits above UK law. Article 10 grants freedom of expression except in limited, and sensible circumstances and "insulting someone else" is not one of those. In fact if this law really is as written MPs had better watch what they say outside of the commons because they seem to spend a good deal of their time being insulting and attempting to cause MPs in other parties distress.
The ironic thing is that these same human rights laws that technically make his arrest illegal are also probably what caused it in the first place. It used to be that odious idiots who did things like burn remembrance poppies would find themselves ostracized from society to some degree which seems a very appropriate response. However that is now illegal under all these human rights laws because it is illegal to discriminate due to political beliefs. While it is very clear that things beyond our control such as gender, race, sexual preference etc. should be protected it is less clear to me that political beliefs should be protected since this is a conscience choice and so is under the full control of the individual and e.g. withholding services, insults (within reason and without threats of physical harm) etc. seems to me to be a legitimate way to make an argument against a particular political choice - certainly it is far better than locking people up!
many people also learn best hands on not in a pure classroom or a classroom with loads of theory and very little hands on.
True but then university is not really designed for these people. If you want to learn hands-on skills then there are vocational training colleges which will do this far better than a university and which have better connections with the industries that you will likely end up working in. These also typically have instructors with practical experience.
The problem with modern society is that we have achieved a very worthwhile goal that just about anyone can go to university if they work hard and want to. However what we have failed to do is educate people about whether they _should_ go. Indeed it seems to have become the default position that as long as you can make the entrance requirements you should go regardless of whether that is the sensible thing to do given your intended career choice.
No, even in a representative democracy the idea is that your representative is supposed to exercise their powers for the wishes of the electorate.
If that were the case why doesn't everyone have a system like Switzerland where the population has to vote on most issues? In fact with modern technology we could probably come up with a system where the population get to decide just about everything.
I would argue that the reason almost nobody has such a system is because, while it would exactly mirror what people want, it would not represent their best interests. Hence we have a system of choosing who will govern us and those people are supposed to act in our best interests but NOT give us exactly what we want. This is also why there are competing political parties: each has its own view about what our best interests are. If it was simply a case of doing what everyone wanted why would you need different ideologies?
One of the things that the article does not seem to mention is any study of areas which will become suitable for growing Arabica beans. All they seem to study are the existing locations. As the climate shifts new areas will open up. For example vineyards are becoming more feasible in the south of England due to climate change. So before I'll believe that coffee is endangered I'd want to see a study confirming that there will be no new areas that are becoming more suitable for coffee growing.
A good scientist is unlikely to be able to turn off his knowledge and intellect and serve the peoples will, and instead would want to enact laws and projects that actually worked and were based on facts and truth.
I'd argue that this is the definition of a good politician: one who acts in the best interests of the people even if is not exactly what they say they want. While I would agree with your description of a typical politician as a demagogue with mediation skills that does not make the typical politician a good politician.
I work in the game industry.....Believe in it as magic budget-saving pixie dust if you like.
Braben works in the industry too. Given that he has co-authored what I would claim is probably the best game ever produced (in comparison to its contemporaries) and given the expensive, DRM-laden rubbish that the majority of the games industry is pumping out at the moment I'll go with Braben's opinion. Afterall he has done it multiple times before so, in a balance of probabilities I'd give him the edge over an AC who works in an industry that does not seem to use procedural generation much, if at all.
£1.25m ($2m) is nothing for modern AAA game development.
If you read the proposal it explains how: procedural generation. This is the same technique which allowed the original Elite game managed to pack 8 Galaxies each with 255 planets into a BBC Micro which had 32Kb of memory - it used the random number generator with seeds to create reproducible sequences of numbers. I understood that this was also why it took so long before Elite was ported to other platforms: they had to reverse engineer the Beeb's random number generator first!
Why does a cat's purr make one smile? Evolution.
No, intelligence. We have learnt that small cats are not to be feared and can be useful so people have learnt to accept them. To be certain you'd need to do studies to confirm whether people can learn to like cats. If people can learn to like - or accept - cats then your argument for evolution immediately goes away since evolution would not be able to distinguish between those people who favoured cats by natural inclination vs. those who realized they were useful and so kept them despite not having a natural inclination for them. Hence, if we assume that someone can learn to accept cats, then either intelligence was the only factor or if evolution played a role then cat-lovers should be less intelligent on average compared to those who don't like cats because even "stupid" cat-lovers would still have cats and survive.
Sports themselves have deleterious long term effects.
So does living - we are talking here about a comparison. Taking drugs will introduce additional, unknown risks whether or not the sport is inherently dangerous.
Really? Many textbooks are used by professors at universities and supported quite heavily.
True, but that support is free and aimed at the professor so that they will choose a particular book. This is part of the reason why textbook costs have managed to spiral out of control: those making the decision about which book to use do not pay the financial cost. It is only in recent years that the costs have got so large that us profs have finally started to notice and will quiz the publishers about the cost. However we often find that the cost differences are so small that it makes little difference which text we go with.
not much of a difference here either
The difference is that, when asked if you point out the security camera and say what's the difference the person will be made to think and, even if they disagree, will at least realize that you are making a point (in a very thought provoking way IMHO). Whereas if you refuse to say why you are taking the video they are more likely to think that you are an annoying idiot and not notice the surveillance camera since, afterall, they are already ignoring it. So really it boils down to whether you are trying to make a point in a clever way or just being an annoying idiot.
This is more like harassment to prove a point.
Actually it is more like harassment without any point. If he was trying to prove a point when asked "why are you videoing me?" he would explain that he is behaving just like a security camera and, since people accept that, why not this? Of course that is not quite true since security cameras do not usually record audio and some of the places he filmed were private where you would not expect cameras. In most of the cases he seems to just respond with a "I'm taking a video" which is no explanation at all.
Smart phones are usually heavily subsidised by the carriers who make their money back via overcharging on the monthly service fee which is why they appear far more affordable than otherwise. However an unlocked iPhone 5 is still half the price of the hearing aid prices quoted and has more features but then it is considerably larger than a hearing aid and the battery does not last as long. So it depends - how much does miniaturisation cost?
I'm not sure, perhaps the cost is due to the royalties they have to pay in order to be able to reproduce copyrighted songs.
Can't speak for Americans as I'm English but we are certainly not getting smarter.
Having grown up in the UK, lived in the US for a few years and now settled in Canada and working in a University I would claim that students are becoming less educated at least on arrival at university. This makes it far harder to determine whether their intelligence has changed. For example in the UK we used to learn simple calculus by the age of 16 for O'level maths. In Canada many students starting university even to do physics or maths have never seen any calculus. This is not because they are less intelligent but simply because they are less educated. Indeed they pick it up fast enough once they are taught it but of course the time spent teaching them this is now not available to teach them more advanced topics at the end of their degree.
At the same time, while I have no confidence at all that IQ really measures intelligence (just look at MENSA), it is interesting that IQ scores are rising given that it is a fixed measure of some mental capability. What this suggests is that we are doubly failing the next generation: school standards are dropping while students are becoming more capable of learning!
I was under the impression that the 100 foot radius (in California--Ianal) was created to prevent campaigners from trying to sway voters to their side
In which case surely the law should be "no campaigning" within ~30m of a polling station. Since official observers are not campaigning this would not apply to them. If the Texas law really applies to "anyone who participates in Texas elections" then it must presumably have numerous exemptions so that the candidates get to vote, the election staff can vote and so the election staff running the station can be there to run it. Seems amazingly complicated if all you want to do is ban campaigning.
If that's what the law states, then I'm glad the Texas AG is doing his job and upholding it since that the law that the democratically elected legislature passed.
Ah - but if they ban international, UN-sanctioned observers from monitoring the election how can anyone have confidence that they are "democratically elected" as you claim? Afterall in the aftermath of the 2000 US presidential election one of your former presidents, Carter, claimed that the US presidential election rules would not satisfy the current UN rules for a true democracy and continues to criticise the way the US holds elections even today. So if your former leaders are not convinced by the process why should the rest of us have any confidence in it if you refuse to let anyone observe it?
Unless you have the ability to predict the future that will never be a real choice. What you are offering is a pill to make you smart and then kill you. You might make no significant breakthrough - unlike Hollywood in real life simply being smart is not enough - otherwise the first thing I would do after taking the pill is figure out a way to overcome the fatal side effects of taking the pill.
Millions of years of evolution have figured out the most efficient way to balance survival, intelligence, and metabolic conservation.
True but the environment that they have optimised us for is the one that we were in during the Stone Age. Evolution is great at optimising but very slow to adapt to changes which is why we are so successful as a species: our intelligence lets us adapt far faster than evolution.
That being said, while I have no objection in principle to intelligence enhancing medication, in reality the problem is that while the short term effects can be easily determined the long term effects are far harder to figure out. So, just like sport, you do not want to end up with people being forced to take drugs to compete which may have deleterious long term effects.
I don't think living in a poor country is a fate worse than death. Being physically and mentally abused to death is far worse than being aborted.
Ignoring the point that until you are dead how would you know what is worse, many poor countries are poor for a reason beyond just not having resources. Lookup some of the recent African conflicts involving child soldiers, rape gangs, genocide and other horrors: I'm not convinced that being born to poor, ignorant, uncaring parents is going to be worse than what some people in Africa have had to endure.
Not a bad idea if it wasn't terribly expensive and a more invasive procedure with more risks to the mother. Do you want to impose the costs of a 3 or 4 month NICU stay on the victim of rape or poverty or should society just foot that bill?
Yes, the expense is a valid point but it's only more invasive if the mother leaves it until late in the pregnancy so arguably that would be her choice. However you would obviously want exceptions for circumstances outside the mother's control such as rape, incest and medical conditions.
I don't want to pay the taxes required to raise unwanted 6-month gestation children and I don't particularly want fetuses to be aborted.
I completely agree. The problem with your suggested planning solution though is what do you do with people who ignore it? Throwing them in gaol or applying large fines will just mean that taxpayers end up footing the bill for the child so you are back to where you started...with the additional costs of such a program.
Fine, when you are pregnant, you can believe that. Just keep it to yourself.
First you completely miss the rest of the post which, starting with that position points out a contradiction in the pro-lifer position: treating a fetus as a person does not mean that a woman should be required to carry it to term. Second to say that only pregnant people should have an opinion on abortion is an interesting position to take given that it takes two people to get pregnant and, as a father, I would argue that while the mother should have an absolute say over her own body, the fetus is not part of her body but a combination of two people both of whose opinions should be equally valid in regard to its treatment. Hence the argument that the mother should be allowed to terminate her life support services when she wants but that the fetus should be given a chance of survival on its own.
What is the essential moral difference between killing someone outright and giving them a minute chance of living?
There is a huge difference. In one case you are deliberately terminating life in the case in point you are simply saying that it is up to each individual to sustain their own life with medical assistance. It is true that this might mean a minute chance of living but the same can be said of, for example, someone who needs a liver transplant. In such a case would you advocate that a suitable donor be required to surrender a portion of their liver or would you regard it as their choice even though saying no might mean there is only a minute chance of the other surviving?