You guys really need to reign in your government, before it's too late for all of us... because once your government fully becomes asshats who don't respect your rights, all of the rest of us are completely fucked.
We tried that the legal way, electing a guy who was a card-carrying ACLU member who had taught constitutional law and written a lot of pro-civil liberties articles to the highest office in the land. The trouble was that he just turned out to be another asshat who didn't respect our rights once he got in office.
There's good news though: So far, I haven't been privy to any recent attempts to violate my Third Amendment right to not have troops quartered in my home without my consent.
Sorry, but there is no way that pasture systems can be as efficient as the modern intensive farming system.
Sure it can, once you factor in all the costs, rather than the costs that the farmer pays directly. The kinds of costs I'm thinking of here: - Environmental damage caused by fertilizer runoff - The wars to secure the oil to create the chemical fertilizers that the farmers depend on - The depletion of the arable land, so that in a couple more generations the land that's currently used for growing feed corn will be able to grow nothing at all, ending up with another Dust Bowl - The CO2 emissions from the more intensive farming methods, which are higher for modern agriculture than the entire US transportation system
I could go on. The point is that modern farming appears cheaper because it's effectively convinced everyone else to pay much of the bill in the form of taxes or inflation or deferred costs.
When you think about it, what corporations are really really trying to be able to do is sell nothing, because nothing has by far the best marginal profit.
Some examples of companies selling nothing:
- Insurance companies who routinely deny claims on the flimsiest of pretexts.
- Banks tacking on fees and surcharges without notice.
- Cell phone companies charging exorbitant fees.
- Almost everything credit card and payday loan places routinely do to their borrowers.
Media companies would love to be in the same position, by selling you "access" to "content" as opposed to physical copies of books, musical recordings, or movies.
A slight quibble here: They (in general, or the guy giving the answer) may or may not *intend* to use the law that way, but it's quite safe to say that the law *will* get used that way if passed.
If an agency director goes to Congress asking for new power XYZ, he may genuinely believe that the intent is to do something totally different from what the civil libertarians are worried about. Now, he may have been misled by his subordinates, or his successor might decide "hey, look at what I can do!" Alternately, of course, he may be the nefarious bastard who knows better but pretends otherwise. Since the basic rule of investigation is that every government official will say exactly what they need to say in order to save themselves, we'll never really know for sure.
If you've elected a Pirate or Pirate-friendly MEP, then your letter makes them more confident to act on your behalf. If you're MEP isn't particularly Pirate-friendly, but focused on something completely different, you may have a chance to convince him.
You make less of a difference than you do getting Pirate and Pirate-friendly candidates elected, but writing your MEP is slightly better than doing nothing.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
There was a lot of incredibly important science going on back then. It just wasn't in the same areas as now, and it wasn't expected to be studied heavily before college.
To give a taste of what was going on scientifically: * Biology was in the middle of radical developments, as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was getting developed, while Gregor Mendel's was quietly developing genetics. * In geography, there had recently been the establishment of the Prime Meridian going through Greenwich and international efforts underway to standardize longitude. * The metric system was spreading throughout Europe, in part because of Napoleon, but also in part because it was easier to work with than the alternatives. * A couple of decades earlier Charles Babbage had built the first thing that could reasonably be called a computer, and Ada Lovelace was kinda programming it. * Louis Pasteur was improving vastly on the understanding of microorganisms and vaccination. * Claude Bernard proposed and described what is now known as the scientific method. * In economics, there were lots of new ideas floating around, with Karl Marx forming the ideas of communism, while Carl Menger was forming the basis of the Austrian School.
Now, there was definitely different emphasis: Anyone who was expecting to be an educated person had to know Latin, Greek, and probably French. Many were trying to enter the clergy, so there was more emphasis on religious matters than there is today. But to say that this was a period of scientific stagnation would just be flat wrong, given that there were a lot of major discoveries going on right around this time of the sorts of principles that we now take for granted.
Experiment 1: 1. Build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. 2. Wait long enough for your copies to have aged appropriately. 3. Fly planes into them. 4. Did you wreck the copies in a similar to way then what happened on 9/11?
Experiment 2: 1. Build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. 2. Wait long enough for your copies to have aged appropriately. 3. Do whatever crazy thing the conspiracies say happened - e.g. use a missile instead of a plane, or plant bombs. 4. Did you wreck the copies in a similar to way then what happened on 9/11?
Of course, there's the small problem of finding the funding to build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, buy 3 airliners, and hire some folks crazy enough to crash the airliners into the building. But in theory you could do it.
While there are certainly personal liberty concerns related to presumption of guilt/innocence or guilt by association, the practical reality is that unless you're a friend of Julian Assange, you're not likely to ever encounter this.
Or you look Muslim. Or you just happen to be someone who pissed off a border agent or TSA guard. Maybe in practice it doesn't hit you personally, but when it comes to civil liberties an encroachment on anybody is an encroachment on everybody.
It's worth noting that the uproar about the backscatter machines really started when wealthier white guys started getting the same sort of degrading treatment that non-white travelers had been getting for years. I certainly noticed the last time I flew anywhere (which was a couple of years ago) that for some reason all the people who looked kinda Arab were getting randomly selected for further screening. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
Based on the treatment of Wikileaks, the US citizens accused of terrorism, police spying on purely political organizations, etc, etc, it looks like their website already has such a map here.
Also consider that an international airport qualifies as a border for customs and immigration purposes, so presumably the next argument will be that arbitrary searches are allowed within 100 miles of one.
The trouble is that those who believe in creationism greatly fear their kids hearing the other side of the story, because they might start believing in evolution.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of a fundamentalist Christian parent: 1. My son/daughter believes in creationism now, they've accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and have been saved, so they're going to Heaven when they die. 2. I have a few friends whose children heard of this evolution stuff from some fancy-pants schoolteacher, and no longer believes in creationism or even Jesus, and is thus a sinner doomed to Hell. My other friend's kids were fine, and still don't believe in evolution, but a few did, so that could be my kid. 3. Thus I should do everything in my power to prevent my kid from hearing about evolution, because the salvation of my child's soul, which to a True Believer is more important than their life, depends on it.
If you believe in that sort of Christianity, but don't believe that your child's faith is strong enough that they might get so easily tempted away, then this is a real fear. This is especially true if you also believe that the theory of evolution was created by Satan in order to tempt the faithful away from God. And if you can't afford a private school, and the kid in question is under the legal dropout age, then from your perspective the law is requiring your little saved child to be tempted by Satan.
I don't believe any of this, but if you try to get into that mindset where these ideas are accepted as the most fundamental truths of existence, it makes perfect sense.
Even better: If pushed to do a creationist story, do one that the parents and principle definitely won't like.
I'd particularly like it if one of the teachers used this law to teach the creation as described in the Koran: It would almost definitely guarantee a thoroughly pissed of Christian right, and the best part is that the Muslim version of the creation story is very very similar to the Jewish and Christian version.
Specifically, his webbing, which is entirely Peter Parker's creation (regardless of what the movie suggested). I mean, that and all his playing around with advanced physics and chemistry.
Science assumes its truth to be be valid and will be proven false at some point in the future.
Actually, it assumes no such thing.
There are some assumptions built into science. Probably the most important one is that science assumes that the laws of the universe do not change over time. If someone observes the universe behaving in a particular way a lot of times, science generally assumes that it will continue to do so. For instance, science generally assumes that if you drop a bowling ball off the Tower of Pisa, it will eventually hit the ground, because that's what's happened every time we've tried it.
At the same time, it most definitely does not assume its truth to be valid. Scientific truth is merely the best description of the universe we can come up with, and is always aware that it isn't quite right.
One other piece of this whole thing: The last time we had this happen, back in 1995, the shutdown backfired pretty heavily on the Republicans. The reason was simply that a lot of folks who thought they agreed with the Contract With America found out that they actually needed all those government bureaucrats they hated so much. The political dynamics were a bit different then, but there's no reason to think the results will be any different now than they were before.
However, one could also argue that a shutdown was in fact the Tea Partiers goal. They believe that they really don't want much of a government, and they're about to get it. I'm sure their funders are overjoyed at the prospect of all those pesky government regulators and inspectors no longer in their hair. If they really believe in the smallest possible government, from their point of view they're in a no-lose situation: Either Obama agrees to their cuts, or a much bigger cut occurs.
In a lot of ways, a big part of their message is that you can do science without being some nerdy guy in a lab coat and goggles. Watching them feels a lot like watching that crazy high school science teacher who would have their students build bottle rockets or potato cannons.
And of course their show is all built around the basics of the scientific method, even if it never makes it explicit: 1. Myth = Hypothesis 2. Experiment to try to replicate the hypothesis. 3. If it fails, do another experiment to see what the hypothesis might have gotten wrong.
Is it the most rigorous version? No. Is it repeating the experiment many times? Heck no. But the basic idea is sound.
The trouble is, right now there's a surplus of top-end-of-genius smart people with PhDs.
I know you wouldn't think so walking down the street, but the simple fact is that for every tenure-track position there are about 12 PhDs with useful published work capable of doing the job and doing it well, and even more for adjunct and other non-tenure track positions. The same sort of imbalance exists for research positions. The effect of this is that a lot of younger would-be scientists are working as part-time lab techs, or going into other fields, or trying to survive as part-time adjunct faculty, and the wages of those sorts of positions are steadily dropping. Also, many universities have been trying to save cash by avoiding giving anybody any sort of chance at tenure, leaving would-be academics basically no chance of making it.
And yes, that's a terrible waste of a lot of brilliant minds, but it's totally consistent with what's been going on in the US for the last 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
What about poets, who cower on a bower before the power tower hour after hour, becoming ever more dour and sour while glowering at flowers?
4) Blackmail Gadhafi loyalists by threatening to reveal their $5.99/min call to you sex chat line.
But this makes it so much easier to send out the message "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"
You guys really need to reign in your government, before it's too late for all of us ... because once your government fully becomes asshats who don't respect your rights, all of the rest of us are completely fucked.
We tried that the legal way, electing a guy who was a card-carrying ACLU member who had taught constitutional law and written a lot of pro-civil liberties articles to the highest office in the land. The trouble was that he just turned out to be another asshat who didn't respect our rights once he got in office.
There's good news though: So far, I haven't been privy to any recent attempts to violate my Third Amendment right to not have troops quartered in my home without my consent.
Sorry, but there is no way that pasture systems can be as efficient as the modern intensive farming system.
Sure it can, once you factor in all the costs, rather than the costs that the farmer pays directly. The kinds of costs I'm thinking of here:
- Environmental damage caused by fertilizer runoff
- The wars to secure the oil to create the chemical fertilizers that the farmers depend on
- The depletion of the arable land, so that in a couple more generations the land that's currently used for growing feed corn will be able to grow nothing at all, ending up with another Dust Bowl
- The CO2 emissions from the more intensive farming methods, which are higher for modern agriculture than the entire US transportation system
I could go on. The point is that modern farming appears cheaper because it's effectively convinced everyone else to pay much of the bill in the form of taxes or inflation or deferred costs.
When you think about it, what corporations are really really trying to be able to do is sell nothing, because nothing has by far the best marginal profit.
Some examples of companies selling nothing:
- Insurance companies who routinely deny claims on the flimsiest of pretexts.
- Banks tacking on fees and surcharges without notice.
- Cell phone companies charging exorbitant fees.
- Almost everything credit card and payday loan places routinely do to their borrowers.
Media companies would love to be in the same position, by selling you "access" to "content" as opposed to physical copies of books, musical recordings, or movies.
A slight quibble here: They (in general, or the guy giving the answer) may or may not *intend* to use the law that way, but it's quite safe to say that the law *will* get used that way if passed.
If an agency director goes to Congress asking for new power XYZ, he may genuinely believe that the intent is to do something totally different from what the civil libertarians are worried about. Now, he may have been misled by his subordinates, or his successor might decide "hey, look at what I can do!" Alternately, of course, he may be the nefarious bastard who knows better but pretends otherwise. Since the basic rule of investigation is that every government official will say exactly what they need to say in order to save themselves, we'll never really know for sure.
That's not entirely true.
If you've elected a Pirate or Pirate-friendly MEP, then your letter makes them more confident to act on your behalf. If you're MEP isn't particularly Pirate-friendly, but focused on something completely different, you may have a chance to convince him.
You make less of a difference than you do getting Pirate and Pirate-friendly candidates elected, but writing your MEP is slightly better than doing nothing.
To be fair, there weren't exactly a whole lot of science back then.
There was a lot of incredibly important science going on back then. It just wasn't in the same areas as now, and it wasn't expected to be studied heavily before college.
To give a taste of what was going on scientifically:
* Biology was in the middle of radical developments, as Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was getting developed, while Gregor Mendel's was quietly developing genetics.
* In geography, there had recently been the establishment of the Prime Meridian going through Greenwich and international efforts underway to standardize longitude.
* The metric system was spreading throughout Europe, in part because of Napoleon, but also in part because it was easier to work with than the alternatives.
* A couple of decades earlier Charles Babbage had built the first thing that could reasonably be called a computer, and Ada Lovelace was kinda programming it.
* Louis Pasteur was improving vastly on the understanding of microorganisms and vaccination.
* Claude Bernard proposed and described what is now known as the scientific method.
* In economics, there were lots of new ideas floating around, with Karl Marx forming the ideas of communism, while Carl Menger was forming the basis of the Austrian School.
Now, there was definitely different emphasis: Anyone who was expecting to be an educated person had to know Latin, Greek, and probably French. Many were trying to enter the clergy, so there was more emphasis on religious matters than there is today. But to say that this was a period of scientific stagnation would just be flat wrong, given that there were a lot of major discoveries going on right around this time of the sorts of principles that we now take for granted.
As a Kurt Vonnegut fan, my first question was "Who died?"
Then I saw what programs were getting cut drastically, and the answer is abundantly clear: poor people and old people.
Many of the 9/11 theories could be tested!
Experiment 1:
1. Build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
2. Wait long enough for your copies to have aged appropriately.
3. Fly planes into them.
4. Did you wreck the copies in a similar to way then what happened on 9/11?
Experiment 2:
1. Build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
2. Wait long enough for your copies to have aged appropriately.
3. Do whatever crazy thing the conspiracies say happened - e.g. use a missile instead of a plane, or plant bombs.
4. Did you wreck the copies in a similar to way then what happened on 9/11?
Of course, there's the small problem of finding the funding to build copies of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, buy 3 airliners, and hire some folks crazy enough to crash the airliners into the building. But in theory you could do it.
Whereas in religion, you can't. No way, no how.
That's in large part because they get a lot more cases than any other circuit.
While there are certainly personal liberty concerns related to presumption of guilt/innocence or guilt by association, the practical reality is that unless you're a friend of Julian Assange, you're not likely to ever encounter this.
Or you look Muslim. Or you just happen to be someone who pissed off a border agent or TSA guard. Maybe in practice it doesn't hit you personally, but when it comes to civil liberties an encroachment on anybody is an encroachment on everybody.
It's worth noting that the uproar about the backscatter machines really started when wealthier white guys started getting the same sort of degrading treatment that non-white travelers had been getting for years. I certainly noticed the last time I flew anywhere (which was a couple of years ago) that for some reason all the people who looked kinda Arab were getting randomly selected for further screening. Pure coincidence, I'm sure.
Based on the treatment of Wikileaks, the US citizens accused of terrorism, police spying on purely political organizations, etc, etc, it looks like their website already has such a map here.
Also consider that an international airport qualifies as a border for customs and immigration purposes, so presumably the next argument will be that arbitrary searches are allowed within 100 miles of one.
Yeah, that definitely deserves a rim shot.
The trouble is that those who believe in creationism greatly fear their kids hearing the other side of the story, because they might start believing in evolution.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of a fundamentalist Christian parent:
1. My son/daughter believes in creationism now, they've accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and have been saved, so they're going to Heaven when they die.
2. I have a few friends whose children heard of this evolution stuff from some fancy-pants schoolteacher, and no longer believes in creationism or even Jesus, and is thus a sinner doomed to Hell. My other friend's kids were fine, and still don't believe in evolution, but a few did, so that could be my kid.
3. Thus I should do everything in my power to prevent my kid from hearing about evolution, because the salvation of my child's soul, which to a True Believer is more important than their life, depends on it.
If you believe in that sort of Christianity, but don't believe that your child's faith is strong enough that they might get so easily tempted away, then this is a real fear. This is especially true if you also believe that the theory of evolution was created by Satan in order to tempt the faithful away from God. And if you can't afford a private school, and the kid in question is under the legal dropout age, then from your perspective the law is requiring your little saved child to be tempted by Satan.
I don't believe any of this, but if you try to get into that mindset where these ideas are accepted as the most fundamental truths of existence, it makes perfect sense.
Even better: If pushed to do a creationist story, do one that the parents and principle definitely won't like.
I'd particularly like it if one of the teachers used this law to teach the creation as described in the Koran: It would almost definitely guarantee a thoroughly pissed of Christian right, and the best part is that the Muslim version of the creation story is very very similar to the Jewish and Christian version.
Specifically, his webbing, which is entirely Peter Parker's creation (regardless of what the movie suggested). I mean, that and all his playing around with advanced physics and chemistry.
Isn't a more appropriate game Depth Charge?
Science assumes its truth to be be valid and will be proven false at some point in the future.
Actually, it assumes no such thing.
There are some assumptions built into science. Probably the most important one is that science assumes that the laws of the universe do not change over time. If someone observes the universe behaving in a particular way a lot of times, science generally assumes that it will continue to do so. For instance, science generally assumes that if you drop a bowling ball off the Tower of Pisa, it will eventually hit the ground, because that's what's happened every time we've tried it.
At the same time, it most definitely does not assume its truth to be valid. Scientific truth is merely the best description of the universe we can come up with, and is always aware that it isn't quite right.
One other piece of this whole thing: The last time we had this happen, back in 1995, the shutdown backfired pretty heavily on the Republicans. The reason was simply that a lot of folks who thought they agreed with the Contract With America found out that they actually needed all those government bureaucrats they hated so much. The political dynamics were a bit different then, but there's no reason to think the results will be any different now than they were before.
However, one could also argue that a shutdown was in fact the Tea Partiers goal. They believe that they really don't want much of a government, and they're about to get it. I'm sure their funders are overjoyed at the prospect of all those pesky government regulators and inspectors no longer in their hair. If they really believe in the smallest possible government, from their point of view they're in a no-lose situation: Either Obama agrees to their cuts, or a much bigger cut occurs.
"You think your Commodore 64 is really neato, What kind of chip you got in there, a Dorito?"
vid
In a lot of ways, a big part of their message is that you can do science without being some nerdy guy in a lab coat and goggles. Watching them feels a lot like watching that crazy high school science teacher who would have their students build bottle rockets or potato cannons.
And of course their show is all built around the basics of the scientific method, even if it never makes it explicit:
1. Myth = Hypothesis
2. Experiment to try to replicate the hypothesis.
3. If it fails, do another experiment to see what the hypothesis might have gotten wrong.
Is it the most rigorous version? No. Is it repeating the experiment many times? Heck no. But the basic idea is sound.
The somewhat more long-winded version is Rabbi Hillel's summation of the Torah:
Do not unto your neighbor what you would not have him do until you; this is the whole Law; the rest is commentary.
The trouble is, right now there's a surplus of top-end-of-genius smart people with PhDs.
I know you wouldn't think so walking down the street, but the simple fact is that for every tenure-track position there are about 12 PhDs with useful published work capable of doing the job and doing it well, and even more for adjunct and other non-tenure track positions. The same sort of imbalance exists for research positions. The effect of this is that a lot of younger would-be scientists are working as part-time lab techs, or going into other fields, or trying to survive as part-time adjunct faculty, and the wages of those sorts of positions are steadily dropping. Also, many universities have been trying to save cash by avoiding giving anybody any sort of chance at tenure, leaving would-be academics basically no chance of making it.
And yes, that's a terrible waste of a lot of brilliant minds, but it's totally consistent with what's been going on in the US for the last 30 years.