AFAIK there's nothing to say that methane-based life couldn't also use DNA. Methane is still carbon and hydrogen. All living organisms on Earth are composed primarily of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (CHON), and the general presumption looking for life elsewhere in the universe is that places with high concentrations of those elements is a good place to look, because we know life can be built out of them. Hydrogen and carbon dioxide are interconvertible with methane and water very much like carbohydrates (such as methane) and oxygen are interconvertible with carbon dioxide and water; all these processes involve the, C, H, and O of CHON equally, and the former was actually quite common early in the history of life on Earth. It wasn't until photosynthetic organisms started using light to convert CO2 and H20 into O2 and various CH's that the now-free O2 and CH4 reacted to become more of the H2O and CO2 that now cover our planet. (And then the O2 kept piling up and almost killed it all until some enterprising organisms started combusting it with those other CH's into more H20 and CO2).
TL:DR; methane really isn't all that weird an environment to find life much like we know it. Molten silicon and iron, on the other hand, or liquid helium, that would require some as-yet-unknown chemistry).
What is now called libertarianism predates anybody ever proposing progressive taxation and social services, and so cannot possibly have been a reaction to that.
Way back in the bad old days, the state was unabashedly an apparatus of the powerful to keep their position of power by exploiting the masses. This was called feudalism, serfdom, aristocracy, etc.
Then some revolutionaries had the crazy idea that the law should treat everybody as equals, give everyone the exact same rights and responsibilities, and let those bloody aristocrats work for a living instead of leeching off the labor of their serfs. Let everyone be free to make their own way in life equally, owing nobody anything but the respect of letting them do the same; and let everybody be responsible for themselves, and unable to burden others with providing for them while not lifting a finger themselves. This was called liberalism, and is now called classical liberalism, or libertarianism.
Later still, some other people said hey, some people are getting richer than others even without special treatment by the law, and that lets them oppress the poor masses anyway even if legally they're all equal; there should not only not be laws favoring the powerful over the powerless, there should be laws favoring the powerless over the powerful. This is called variously socialism, communism, or other names depending on the flavor; and because it's advocated by the same classes of people who were advocating the removal of legal restrictions earlier, the name for their movement -- "liberalism" -- was inaccurately applied to it, despite it no longer being about liberty per se.
Since both the people who liked the old feudalism and systems like it, and the people who liked liberalism before socialism came along, are fighting to preserve some system they see as good against changes they see as bad, both are "conservative". But to the original right wing, liberals (classical liberals, libertarians) are just as radically leftist as socialists. And to liberals, socialists are taking a step backward from equality before the law back into authoritarianism and some people living off the labor of others. And to socialists, like yourself apparently, both liberals and the old conservatives appear equally to resist the glorious socialist revolution, despite the fact that they disagree with each other just as much as liberals disagree with socialists.
The left-right dichotomy is not exclusively about the means of production and distribution of wealth. It began as a divide between the aristocracy and the commoners, and what is now called "libertarian" (generally considered "right-wing" in America) was originally a left-wing position, being against the established powers of the nobles.
This sounds great, provided that they start making "phones" which run real, general-purpose desktop OS's, with perhaps some minified "phone"-like UI for tiny screens (like the built-in one).
I still don't own a "smart phone" because when phones first started coming out with non-telephony features, I said "you're doing this backwards, talk to me when you put a general-purpose computer into a widget that fits in my pocket". Hardware-wise, they've done that now; but the software still comes at it from a "this is a phone, with other extra features that you can buy piecemeal" approach.
Give me a MacBook in an iPod form factor, which I can then click into a tablet housing or dock to a keyboard and mouse, and I'll be in heaven. But stick a bloody iPhone on my 21" monitor? No thanks.
from building a mini fire extinguisher to writing with invisible ink.
That's nice, but we're talking about chemistry.
You realize that fire extinguishers and invisible ink both work on chemical principles, right?
Fire extinguishers inhibit combustion reactions. Invisible inks are frequently made visible by reacting the ink with another chemical, changing its absorption spectrum.
Oh no, by all means keep the special little egg in its basket until adulthood because CERTAINLY the real world never calls you names, beats you up or fucks you over repeatedly.
People who grow up with that shit learn to accept it and think it's normal and the way the world is supposed to work.
The world could use a big, healthy dose of people who didn't grow up with those expectations, who walk out into the real world and shout "What the FUCK is WRONG with you people!?!?"
Hell in this very thread we have half of the posts complaining that schools are full of punks and bullies running amok while the other half complain that they are prison like indoctrination centers. You can't have it both ways.
Right, and you can have either a police state or total anomie. There's no way we can protect the innocent from the malicious without chaining everybody down for their own safety.
Where I live (where I was born, to a family that has always been and still is below the poverty level) the median home price is over a million dollars. A cheap home on the outskirts of a neighboring small town MIGHT, if you're lucky, get down to $500K. My dad is still struggling to pay off the doublewide mobile home I grew up in.
If I am very lucky and continue to live like a college student for the rest of my life, I might be able to afford a home by the time I retire, and know that even if I don't have any significant income, at least I'm not going to end up on the street in my old age. At some point I will be able to stop and breath and enjoy a late morning tea and read a book before going back to bed as my body slowly gives out from under me, instead of shivering in the cold and dying of exposure because I'm unable to work anymore.
That is, unless the house that I could barely afford continues to rise in value, and the taxes on it continue to go up, and I am required to spend more and more of the money I don't have just for the privilege of keeping the house I worked my entire life to pay off.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but contempt for people who treat homes as investments and just a way to make more money off of other suckers later on, but everybody deserves the opportunity to at least secure a space of their own to live in and not have that taken away from them when they need it most because those asshole flippers have jacked up the property values. And that opportunity is the only way for people to get out form under the subjugation of the worst kind of property "investor", the kind who buy a house, rent it out, use the proceeds to buy another house, rent that out, and grow their own little fiefdom off the hard-earned money of people too poor to afford a down payment themselves.
The video on Yahoo's site talks all about all kinds of search features which all sound perfectly interesting as features of a search site.
But how exactly is it a browser? Or, I suppose, why? Everything it says it does could be done in a site accessible from any browser. Did they just decide to package the site in a stand-alone application because... someone doesn't understand the difference between a site you view in a browser (albeit a site you use to find other sites), and the browser itself which accesses and renders those sites?
You are jumping to conclusions. Being clearer and more concise about the limits placed on Federal government does not imply being more lenient on State governments, despite the country being full of morons who support that idiotic position.
My hypothetical changes have absolutely no bearing on the powers of State governments, because the limitations on them come from four amendments later, after the Civil War:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This has been generally interpreted to mean that the limits on the Federal government apply also to the State governments. My hypothetical clarification on the limits on the Federal government would thus apply via the 14th Amendment to the States as well: they have no powers except those explicitly granted to them, and their citizens have all rights not explicitly curbed by those powers, even ones that haven't been enumerated.
And it could have been, and should have been, much more succinct in that purpose. They should have put the ninth and tenth first:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
and then summed up the other eight in one fell swoop:
"Congress shall make no law restricting the rights retained by the people unless explicitly authorized by the powers delegated to it by the Constitution."
Makes it pretty clear, I think: we (the people) can do anything we like, except things we've explicitly allowed you (the state) to control; and you can't do shit except the things we've explicitly allowed you to.
GPP's point was that selection always comes eventually, and our present ability to preserve diversity means that when it does come, there will be a much wider variety to be selected from
Fitness can mean getting the kids taken away by the government (they'll survive) so that time can be focused on activities that might produce more.
Of course, for this to be a sustainable trait, the breeding population who gets their kids taken away would have to produce enough smart/hardworking/etc kids to become the next generation of the government (and the productive taxpayers who support it). This non-reproducing upper class would then be biologically like the "gay uncle": not directly contributing genes, but contributing to the survival of genes they share.
Taken to the extreme, this would be a pseudo-speciation of the species into insect-like castes -- a breeder caste and a provider caste -- still the same species, but only one in ever ten children or some such is born a "provider", while the rest are born "breeders".
While this might be biologically tenable, it would leave the providers entirely burdened with the care of the breeders, and the breeders entirely beholden to the providers, and so would not likely be a situation any thinking human would want to encourage.
So say I make hand-crafted widgets out of my garage. I start doing enough business that I need to hire a secretary to handle the administrative minutia while I craft my widgets. But she won't stop going on about how great GWB was and how Obama is an evil socialist Islamist who wasn't even born here. I find that offensive and don't want to hear it in my shop. I can't get rid of her and find someone else I like working with better?
Something about this story sounds completely backward in every way, and maybe someone here can explain if it's the judge, the writer/editor, or just me who is sorely confused.
First of all, insufficient to count as free speech? Have we really come so far from not only the letter but even the spirit of the First Amendment that only certain special classes of speech deserve protection from censorship, rather than (as the law literally states) all speech being completely protected, or at least (as courts have long interpreted) only certain egregiously dangerous speech, such as credible incitement to violence, deserving censorship? Is it really now no longer "is this dangerous enough to censor it?" but "is this acceptable enough to permit it?"
Second of all, who is censoring who here? Someone got fired because their boss didn't like their opinion. In a private business (see next sentence before you jump on this) that's perfectly fine; freedom of association and all that, I don't have to work for people I don't like and I shouldn't have to let people I don't like work for me either; I've quit a job in part because of the owner's political expressions, why should the other way around be any different. In this case it's a public agency so I can see some stricter rules for hiring and firing being required, but nevertheless, in any case, this is a wrongful termination issue, not a free speech issue. This is not the government telling you "you are not allowed to say X"; this is an employer saying "we won't employ people who support Y". How the hell did this become an issue of free speech at all?
I agree completely, and I think the approach to take in such emotional appeals is to replace their faith in religion with faith in themselves. There is no God, nobody is going to give you all the answers or solve all of your problems -- but that's OK, because you don't need anyone to! You are capable of finding answers and solving problems yourself! We are not helpless nothings entirely dependent on outside help; we are capable beings on our own.
It's kind of like telling someone that they're fired, but it's ok because they're independently wealthy now. Or more like telling someone they've actually never had a job at all, that there haven't been any direct deposits into their bank account like they've believed, but that's not a problem because they didn't need and have been doing just fine without them. And now that they know this, they can "quit" and stop toiling for a "job" that doesn't "pay", since they never needed it to begin with -- they're themselves are "rich"! How is that not great news?
I agree that religion is defined by faith, in a certain specific sense: taking something as epistemically obligatory, i.e. that you ought to think it, without any good reasons to back that. (It's fine to hold something to be epistemically permissible without reason, so long as there are no reasons to the contrary; if I can show no reason why you shouldn't believe something, it would be fideistic of me to say you shouldn't, though not simply to say that I don't have to too).
Almost any kind of fallacious appeal fleshes out to faith in this sense, including appeals to authority, popularity, and tradition: presenting an opinion as thought it is epistemically obliged by something, but that something is empty. So GPP was also on about "collective belief": if you believe something because it's part of your group identity to believe it, that's faith, and therefore religion.
Any kind of (obliged) belief in the supernatural is also necessarily based on faith and therefore religious, as by definition the supernatural is beyond observation and evidence and so no reasons can possibly be given to oblige belief in it. (Note that I am not saying all "obliging" of belief is religious: if you have evidence and reason to back your assertion, it is perfectly rational to make it).
There are many things commonly characteristic of "religion" - God, a supernatural authority; the supernatural in general; authority in general - but what they all have in common is unjustified assertions.
Yes, we need to focus our national dialogue right now on the plight of Silicon Valley workers. That will inspire the populace.
I was speaking in general, not about this topic in particular.
Conservatives don't deny problems. They simply recognize that the federal government should not be the first and most desired source of "solutions."
Plenty of conservatives say that so long as the government just does nothing, market forces will magically solve all social problems. That is demonstrably false, and tantamount to denying that there is a problem. Someone has to intentionally do something to solve many of our problems.
But that doesn't mean that any such solution requires a violation of free market principles (or more generally, liber(al|tarian) principles), which is the point I was emphasizing with my response.
I want to mod you up, but it wouldn't be clear why I think your words deserve more notice, so I'm replying instead.
Conservatives often have (what I consider) valid criticisms of liberals' proposed solutions to various problems.
The problem is, instead of offering alternative solutions, they deny the problems.
We need to get a dialogue going on both sides of the aisle which both acknowledges the existence of the problems, and the inadequacy of the proposed solutions currently on the table, and begins brainstorming new ideas, instead of this monotonous repetition of "There is a problem and THIS is the solution!" vs "That solution sucks, therefore there is no problem." Somebody needs to say "There is a problem; now, what is the solution?"
Slashdot Mirror
Replying to undo mistaken moderation; meant 'Funny', not 'Overrated'.
AFAIK there's nothing to say that methane-based life couldn't also use DNA. Methane is still carbon and hydrogen. All living organisms on Earth are composed primarily of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (CHON), and the general presumption looking for life elsewhere in the universe is that places with high concentrations of those elements is a good place to look, because we know life can be built out of them. Hydrogen and carbon dioxide are interconvertible with methane and water very much like carbohydrates (such as methane) and oxygen are interconvertible with carbon dioxide and water; all these processes involve the, C, H, and O of CHON equally, and the former was actually quite common early in the history of life on Earth. It wasn't until photosynthetic organisms started using light to convert CO2 and H20 into O2 and various CH's that the now-free O2 and CH4 reacted to become more of the H2O and CO2 that now cover our planet. (And then the O2 kept piling up and almost killed it all until some enterprising organisms started combusting it with those other CH's into more H20 and CO2).
TL:DR; methane really isn't all that weird an environment to find life much like we know it. Molten silicon and iron, on the other hand, or liquid helium, that would require some as-yet-unknown chemistry).
What is now called libertarianism predates anybody ever proposing progressive taxation and social services, and so cannot possibly have been a reaction to that.
Way back in the bad old days, the state was unabashedly an apparatus of the powerful to keep their position of power by exploiting the masses. This was called feudalism, serfdom, aristocracy, etc.
Then some revolutionaries had the crazy idea that the law should treat everybody as equals, give everyone the exact same rights and responsibilities, and let those bloody aristocrats work for a living instead of leeching off the labor of their serfs. Let everyone be free to make their own way in life equally, owing nobody anything but the respect of letting them do the same; and let everybody be responsible for themselves, and unable to burden others with providing for them while not lifting a finger themselves. This was called liberalism, and is now called classical liberalism, or libertarianism.
Later still, some other people said hey, some people are getting richer than others even without special treatment by the law, and that lets them oppress the poor masses anyway even if legally they're all equal; there should not only not be laws favoring the powerful over the powerless, there should be laws favoring the powerless over the powerful. This is called variously socialism, communism, or other names depending on the flavor; and because it's advocated by the same classes of people who were advocating the removal of legal restrictions earlier, the name for their movement -- "liberalism" -- was inaccurately applied to it, despite it no longer being about liberty per se.
Since both the people who liked the old feudalism and systems like it, and the people who liked liberalism before socialism came along, are fighting to preserve some system they see as good against changes they see as bad, both are "conservative". But to the original right wing, liberals (classical liberals, libertarians) are just as radically leftist as socialists. And to liberals, socialists are taking a step backward from equality before the law back into authoritarianism and some people living off the labor of others. And to socialists, like yourself apparently, both liberals and the old conservatives appear equally to resist the glorious socialist revolution, despite the fact that they disagree with each other just as much as liberals disagree with socialists.
The left-right dichotomy is not exclusively about the means of production and distribution of wealth. It began as a divide between the aristocracy and the commoners, and what is now called "libertarian" (generally considered "right-wing" in America) was originally a left-wing position, being against the established powers of the nobles.
This sounds great, provided that they start making "phones" which run real, general-purpose desktop OS's, with perhaps some minified "phone"-like UI for tiny screens (like the built-in one).
I still don't own a "smart phone" because when phones first started coming out with non-telephony features, I said "you're doing this backwards, talk to me when you put a general-purpose computer into a widget that fits in my pocket". Hardware-wise, they've done that now; but the software still comes at it from a "this is a phone, with other extra features that you can buy piecemeal" approach.
Give me a MacBook in an iPod form factor, which I can then click into a tablet housing or dock to a keyboard and mouse, and I'll be in heaven. But stick a bloody iPhone on my 21" monitor? No thanks.
from building a mini fire extinguisher to writing with invisible ink.
That's nice, but we're talking about chemistry.
You realize that fire extinguishers and invisible ink both work on chemical principles, right?
Fire extinguishers inhibit combustion reactions. Invisible inks are frequently made visible by reacting the ink with another chemical, changing its absorption spectrum.
Oh no, by all means keep the special little egg in its basket until adulthood because CERTAINLY the real world never calls you names, beats you up or fucks you over repeatedly.
People who grow up with that shit learn to accept it and think it's normal and the way the world is supposed to work.
The world could use a big, healthy dose of people who didn't grow up with those expectations, who walk out into the real world and shout "What the FUCK is WRONG with you people!?!?"
Hell in this very thread we have half of the posts complaining that schools are full of punks and bullies running amok while the other half complain that they are prison like indoctrination centers. You can't have it both ways.
Right, and you can have either a police state or total anomie. There's no way we can protect the innocent from the malicious without chaining everybody down for their own safety.
There's an ad on this page as I write this which reads:
"Earn a Bible Degree. Study The Bible Online. Earn a Degree Today."
I would say it was ironic if not for the obvious context-based ad placement, but it's still... I don't know, poignant?
While you're at it, also ask them about "Douglas Englebart" and "Jef Raskin".
Where I live (where I was born, to a family that has always been and still is below the poverty level) the median home price is over a million dollars. A cheap home on the outskirts of a neighboring small town MIGHT, if you're lucky, get down to $500K. My dad is still struggling to pay off the doublewide mobile home I grew up in.
If I am very lucky and continue to live like a college student for the rest of my life, I might be able to afford a home by the time I retire, and know that even if I don't have any significant income, at least I'm not going to end up on the street in my old age. At some point I will be able to stop and breath and enjoy a late morning tea and read a book before going back to bed as my body slowly gives out from under me, instead of shivering in the cold and dying of exposure because I'm unable to work anymore.
That is, unless the house that I could barely afford continues to rise in value, and the taxes on it continue to go up, and I am required to spend more and more of the money I don't have just for the privilege of keeping the house I worked my entire life to pay off.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing but contempt for people who treat homes as investments and just a way to make more money off of other suckers later on, but everybody deserves the opportunity to at least secure a space of their own to live in and not have that taken away from them when they need it most because those asshole flippers have jacked up the property values. And that opportunity is the only way for people to get out form under the subjugation of the worst kind of property "investor", the kind who buy a house, rent it out, use the proceeds to buy another house, rent that out, and grow their own little fiefdom off the hard-earned money of people too poor to afford a down payment themselves.
The video on Yahoo's site talks all about all kinds of search features which all sound perfectly interesting as features of a search site.
But how exactly is it a browser? Or, I suppose, why? Everything it says it does could be done in a site accessible from any browser. Did they just decide to package the site in a stand-alone application because... someone doesn't understand the difference between a site you view in a browser (albeit a site you use to find other sites), and the browser itself which accesses and renders those sites?
You are jumping to conclusions. Being clearer and more concise about the limits placed on Federal government does not imply being more lenient on State governments, despite the country being full of morons who support that idiotic position.
My hypothetical changes have absolutely no bearing on the powers of State governments, because the limitations on them come from four amendments later, after the Civil War:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This has been generally interpreted to mean that the limits on the Federal government apply also to the State governments. My hypothetical clarification on the limits on the Federal government would thus apply via the 14th Amendment to the States as well: they have no powers except those explicitly granted to them, and their citizens have all rights not explicitly curbed by those powers, even ones that haven't been enumerated.
Or a magical palace on the moon.
With blackjack and hookers, of course.
And it could have been, and should have been, much more succinct in that purpose. They should have put the ninth and tenth first:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
and then summed up the other eight in one fell swoop:
"Congress shall make no law restricting the rights retained by the people unless explicitly authorized by the powers delegated to it by the Constitution."
Makes it pretty clear, I think: we (the people) can do anything we like, except things we've explicitly allowed you (the state) to control; and you can't do shit except the things we've explicitly allowed you to.
GPP's point was that selection always comes eventually, and our present ability to preserve diversity means that when it does come, there will be a much wider variety to be selected from
Evolution moves in a mysterious way
Its wonders to perform;
It plants its footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
At first I expected this to be a parody of a U2 song and just couldn't make it scan...
Fitness can mean getting the kids taken away by the government (they'll survive) so that time can be focused on activities that might produce more.
Of course, for this to be a sustainable trait, the breeding population who gets their kids taken away would have to produce enough smart/hardworking/etc kids to become the next generation of the government (and the productive taxpayers who support it). This non-reproducing upper class would then be biologically like the "gay uncle": not directly contributing genes, but contributing to the survival of genes they share.
Taken to the extreme, this would be a pseudo-speciation of the species into insect-like castes -- a breeder caste and a provider caste -- still the same species, but only one in ever ten children or some such is born a "provider", while the rest are born "breeders".
While this might be biologically tenable, it would leave the providers entirely burdened with the care of the breeders, and the breeders entirely beholden to the providers, and so would not likely be a situation any thinking human would want to encourage.
So say I make hand-crafted widgets out of my garage. I start doing enough business that I need to hire a secretary to handle the administrative minutia while I craft my widgets. But she won't stop going on about how great GWB was and how Obama is an evil socialist Islamist who wasn't even born here. I find that offensive and don't want to hear it in my shop. I can't get rid of her and find someone else I like working with better?
Something about this story sounds completely backward in every way, and maybe someone here can explain if it's the judge, the writer/editor, or just me who is sorely confused.
First of all, insufficient to count as free speech? Have we really come so far from not only the letter but even the spirit of the First Amendment that only certain special classes of speech deserve protection from censorship, rather than (as the law literally states) all speech being completely protected, or at least (as courts have long interpreted) only certain egregiously dangerous speech, such as credible incitement to violence, deserving censorship? Is it really now no longer "is this dangerous enough to censor it?" but "is this acceptable enough to permit it?"
Second of all, who is censoring who here? Someone got fired because their boss didn't like their opinion. In a private business (see next sentence before you jump on this) that's perfectly fine; freedom of association and all that, I don't have to work for people I don't like and I shouldn't have to let people I don't like work for me either; I've quit a job in part because of the owner's political expressions, why should the other way around be any different. In this case it's a public agency so I can see some stricter rules for hiring and firing being required, but nevertheless, in any case, this is a wrongful termination issue, not a free speech issue. This is not the government telling you "you are not allowed to say X"; this is an employer saying "we won't employ people who support Y". How the hell did this become an issue of free speech at all?
I agree completely, and I think the approach to take in such emotional appeals is to replace their faith in religion with faith in themselves. There is no God, nobody is going to give you all the answers or solve all of your problems -- but that's OK, because you don't need anyone to! You are capable of finding answers and solving problems yourself! We are not helpless nothings entirely dependent on outside help; we are capable beings on our own.
It's kind of like telling someone that they're fired, but it's ok because they're independently wealthy now. Or more like telling someone they've actually never had a job at all, that there haven't been any direct deposits into their bank account like they've believed, but that's not a problem because they didn't need and have been doing just fine without them. And now that they know this, they can "quit" and stop toiling for a "job" that doesn't "pay", since they never needed it to begin with -- they're themselves are "rich"! How is that not great news?
I agree that religion is defined by faith, in a certain specific sense: taking something as epistemically obligatory, i.e. that you ought to think it, without any good reasons to back that. (It's fine to hold something to be epistemically permissible without reason, so long as there are no reasons to the contrary; if I can show no reason why you shouldn't believe something, it would be fideistic of me to say you shouldn't, though not simply to say that I don't have to too).
Almost any kind of fallacious appeal fleshes out to faith in this sense, including appeals to authority, popularity, and tradition: presenting an opinion as thought it is epistemically obliged by something, but that something is empty. So GPP was also on about "collective belief": if you believe something because it's part of your group identity to believe it, that's faith, and therefore religion.
Any kind of (obliged) belief in the supernatural is also necessarily based on faith and therefore religious, as by definition the supernatural is beyond observation and evidence and so no reasons can possibly be given to oblige belief in it. (Note that I am not saying all "obliging" of belief is religious: if you have evidence and reason to back your assertion, it is perfectly rational to make it).
There are many things commonly characteristic of "religion" - God, a supernatural authority; the supernatural in general; authority in general - but what they all have in common is unjustified assertions.
Its called a business license, and you're almost certainly in violation unless you have one.
Also depending on where you made the phone call, you might or might not be in violation of property zoning laws.
And is that not completely ridiculous, and the point of the GPP by analogy to this situation?
Should we go after all the teenagers mowing their neighbors' laws for $5 next? (zomg child labor too in that case!)
Yes, we need to focus our national dialogue right now on the plight of Silicon Valley workers. That will inspire the populace.
I was speaking in general, not about this topic in particular.
Conservatives don't deny problems. They simply recognize that the federal government should not be the first and most desired source of "solutions."
Plenty of conservatives say that so long as the government just does nothing, market forces will magically solve all social problems. That is demonstrably false, and tantamount to denying that there is a problem. Someone has to intentionally do something to solve many of our problems.
But that doesn't mean that any such solution requires a violation of free market principles (or more generally, liber(al|tarian) principles), which is the point I was emphasizing with my response.
I want to mod you up, but it wouldn't be clear why I think your words deserve more notice, so I'm replying instead.
Conservatives often have (what I consider) valid criticisms of liberals' proposed solutions to various problems.
The problem is, instead of offering alternative solutions, they deny the problems.
We need to get a dialogue going on both sides of the aisle which both acknowledges the existence of the problems, and the inadequacy of the proposed solutions currently on the table, and begins brainstorming new ideas, instead of this monotonous repetition of "There is a problem and THIS is the solution!" vs "That solution sucks, therefore there is no problem." Somebody needs to say "There is a problem; now, what is the solution?"