Science is also a long account of people with wrong theories (that's actually the best of the batch; many theories fall into the "not even wrong" pile) and experimental results that don't mean what the experimenters think. It can take time to shake these things out.
This is my memory of Cold Fusion. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
A couple of chemists announced that they'd achieved fusion, because when doing some things they got more heat than they expected. There was a wave of people trying to replicate it, and some were reporting that, yes, it was fusion, because it produced neutrons. (The head discrepancy was small enough to be explained by chemical or subatomic means, but chemical reactions do not themselves release neutrons.) It turned out that a surprising number of scientists didn't know how to reliably detect neutrons.
Shortly before 1905, how many situations were there where Newton's laws failed? The precession of Mercury's orbit was explained pretty well with the hypothetical planet Vulcan, just as anomalies in the orbit of Saturn were explained by the hypothetical planet Uranus, and anomalies in the orbit of Uranus were explained by the hypothetical planet Neptune. The Michelson-Morley experimental results were definitely unexpected, but that suggested rather than required a revision to Newtonian mechanics.
The same didn't hold for quantum mechanics, as there were several known problems with light and its interactions with other things, the most glaring being explaining black-body radiation.
Laws of physics are the best models of fundamental reality we have. They're really, really good models as far as we can tell. The stuff we can't explain is typically in really exotic situations. They're essential for understanding things. Scientists have varying degrees of certainty about things. They're pretty darn sure that Newton's law of gravitation is mostly true. They're really uncertain about how gravity works on scales best modeled by quantum mechanics. The conservation laws are things that they're pretty darn sure of.
Mathematically, if conservation of momentum is violated, physical laws change significantly over space. (It gets more complicated with relativity, but on the scale we're dealing with I think we can ignore it for now.) This isn't something we've observed. Everywhere we look, the laws of physics seem to be the same to (in some cases) ridiculous-looking accuracy and precision. Any physical theory without conservation of momentum has to explain that somehow.
And the really exotic situations I mentioned? We're talking about bouncing microwaves around a cavity. This is something we've been doing since before most of us were born, and we haven't seen weird science come out of it. If the EM drive did violate momentum, we'd expect to have seen a lot more discrepancies than we have. We have a very large amount of general experimental evidence that suggests that microwaves just can't do that.
What we have is a claim of a violation of physical laws that would make faster-than-light neutrinos look tame. We don't know that the EM drive works. Instead, we have some experimental results that look interesting, and the probability that there's some sort of experimental error or misunderstood effect is far, far greater than the probability that this is a reactionless space drive.
BTW, educated people have known for millennia that the Earth is some sort of round. The easiest giveaway is to look at something distant over a body of water. The water's pretty flat, and yet it cuts off the bottom of distant objects. We've had a good estimate of the Earth's circumference for well over two thousand years. Columbus didn't have problems getting backing because he said the world was round. He had problems because he argued that it was much smaller than people thought, and he was wrong. He was fortunate to find undiscovered land, because his expedition wasn't going to make it around the world to the Indies.
What we've got here is a physical effect that we can't currently explain. It could be experimental error; we'll have to wait for replication results to come in to be sure. It could be that it's something perfectly ordinary that nobody's quite figured out yet. It could be some form of new physics, but new physics coming from old-hat things like bouncing microwaves around seems awfully unlikely. It's conceivable that it does violate conservation laws, in which case we probably have to rebuild physics from the ground up. Still, until we explain it, we're going to be curious.
If you'll give me evidence that the bulk of voters consider new evidence dispassionately and on its merits, I might agree with you. Comey made a vague announcement that gave Trump a boost in the polls, despite the fact that what he was looking at had nothing useful for the Clinton investigation.
Some unions are corrupt. Not all of them. The ones that are corrupt tend to make the news.
Unions have done a tremendous amount to improve working conditions and pay for working-class people. They're more a blessing than a scam (although there's elements of both). Read some history.
Germany is heavily unionized, and seems to still have a functioning economy.
I'm not worried personally. I'm sufficiently old and have sufficient resources to have a good retirement if I'm laid off tomorrow. I'm working partly to get an
even nicer retirement.
She talked about a younger workforce while laying off older workers. That's not something a competent CEO would ever say in the US, because it's evidence of age discrimination. No competent corporate officer would ever hint at hiring people of one race or religion or sex (except for bona fide reasons), and age is just as illegal to discriminate by.
The main components of mortgage payments are principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI). If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, your total principal plus interest will stay the same, although the interest component will go down slowly (REAL slowly at the start of the mortgage) and the principal payment will go up accordingly. If you want to pay off the mortgage early, start sending extra payments immediately, to bring down the principal.
Taxes and insurance are not fixed. Check your bill to see where that extra $600 came from.
When individuals try to scam the system, I hear that judges are good at seeing through lame excuses. When companies try to scam the system, the judges seem to let them use dubious schemes.
There's also the cold electoral calculus. If blacks are going to vote almost all Democrat anyway, they don't get a whole lot of practical love. If they'll get more votes per plausible promise from Hispanics, that's who they're going to go after.
In a negotiation, if you can't walk away, you're going to get screwed. If the Republicans started encouraging blacks, blacks would have a lot more political leverage. The Republicans are also throwing away support from groups that are generally religious conservatives because they insist on turning away minority groups.
Any government whose leader is not assured a majority in at least the lower house (Congress) is designed to be dysfunctional.
The US system was not designed to avoid being dysfunctional. It also wasn't as well designed as it would have been with hindsight. The President was supposed to replace the King, on a temporary and elected basis. Kings were generally not officially partisans, although they might favor one party more than another. Many of the Founders didn't want political parties to form the way they did.
Personally, I think it was a darn good piece of work for when it happened and with such limited experience, but it has its flaws.
There is evidence that Russia is providing the emails through Wikileaks. The evidence I've got isn't conclusive, but flat claiming that Russia didn't do it suggests that the poster doesn't actually care about the evidence.
There's lots of Democrats who don't care that a bunch of Republicans call Clinton a treasonous criminal, lacking decent evidence for either treason or crime.
You're also casually assuming that US intelligence services are lying, and that for some reason Obama wants to provoke Russia. US intelligence services are not known for their honesty, and Presidents have done stupid things before, but you're assuming that Russia is innocuous (an odd conviction) and that Obama wants a war with Russia.
Your WWII history isn't any better. The Luftwaffe lost about the same number of planes in the Battle of France as the Battle of Britain, if I remember correctly, and nobody's accused the British of rolling over. France fell so fast because of General Gamelin's strategy, not any lack of fighting spirit, complicated by the problems with French armor and air doctrine. The French fought hard when they could fight, and improved their tactics as the battle went on.
Presidential directives are essentially orders to the executive branch on how to execute their duties, and have been issued by Presidents for a long time. Last I looked (a few years ago), you had to go back to Grover Cleveland to find a lower rate of directives. They do not carry the force of law.
Presidents have been committing acts of war without Congressional approval for a long time now. This isn't just a modern or a Democrat thing.
So you're willing to accept FBI announcements that fit with your world view happily, but reluctantly and half-heartedly if they disagree with your world view?
The FBI has concluded that the additional emails they're looking at do not change their recommendation of no prosecution, so all of you email alarmists should back down. It's possible that other people may get into trouble from that investigation, but not Clinton.
It's not symbolic. It determines who the Electoral College votes for. The Electors haven't ignored the popular vote in my lifetime. There have been cases where the popular vote for a state was recorded incorrectly, by accident or design.
The IRS is likely to investigate a church if they engage in political activity, such as recommending a candidate or political party. It's constitutional.
Slashdot Mirror
Science is also a long account of people with wrong theories (that's actually the best of the batch; many theories fall into the "not even wrong" pile) and experimental results that don't mean what the experimenters think. It can take time to shake these things out.
This is my memory of Cold Fusion. Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
A couple of chemists announced that they'd achieved fusion, because when doing some things they got more heat than they expected. There was a wave of people trying to replicate it, and some were reporting that, yes, it was fusion, because it produced neutrons. (The head discrepancy was small enough to be explained by chemical or subatomic means, but chemical reactions do not themselves release neutrons.) It turned out that a surprising number of scientists didn't know how to reliably detect neutrons.
Shortly before 1905, how many situations were there where Newton's laws failed? The precession of Mercury's orbit was explained pretty well with the hypothetical planet Vulcan, just as anomalies in the orbit of Saturn were explained by the hypothetical planet Uranus, and anomalies in the orbit of Uranus were explained by the hypothetical planet Neptune. The Michelson-Morley experimental results were definitely unexpected, but that suggested rather than required a revision to Newtonian mechanics.
The same didn't hold for quantum mechanics, as there were several known problems with light and its interactions with other things, the most glaring being explaining black-body radiation.
Laws of physics are the best models of fundamental reality we have. They're really, really good models as far as we can tell. The stuff we can't explain is typically in really exotic situations. They're essential for understanding things. Scientists have varying degrees of certainty about things. They're pretty darn sure that Newton's law of gravitation is mostly true. They're really uncertain about how gravity works on scales best modeled by quantum mechanics. The conservation laws are things that they're pretty darn sure of.
Mathematically, if conservation of momentum is violated, physical laws change significantly over space. (It gets more complicated with relativity, but on the scale we're dealing with I think we can ignore it for now.) This isn't something we've observed. Everywhere we look, the laws of physics seem to be the same to (in some cases) ridiculous-looking accuracy and precision. Any physical theory without conservation of momentum has to explain that somehow.
And the really exotic situations I mentioned? We're talking about bouncing microwaves around a cavity. This is something we've been doing since before most of us were born, and we haven't seen weird science come out of it. If the EM drive did violate momentum, we'd expect to have seen a lot more discrepancies than we have. We have a very large amount of general experimental evidence that suggests that microwaves just can't do that.
What we have is a claim of a violation of physical laws that would make faster-than-light neutrinos look tame. We don't know that the EM drive works. Instead, we have some experimental results that look interesting, and the probability that there's some sort of experimental error or misunderstood effect is far, far greater than the probability that this is a reactionless space drive.
BTW, educated people have known for millennia that the Earth is some sort of round. The easiest giveaway is to look at something distant over a body of water. The water's pretty flat, and yet it cuts off the bottom of distant objects. We've had a good estimate of the Earth's circumference for well over two thousand years. Columbus didn't have problems getting backing because he said the world was round. He had problems because he argued that it was much smaller than people thought, and he was wrong. He was fortunate to find undiscovered land, because his expedition wasn't going to make it around the world to the Indies.
What we've got here is a physical effect that we can't currently explain. It could be experimental error; we'll have to wait for replication results to come in to be sure. It could be that it's something perfectly ordinary that nobody's quite figured out yet. It could be some form of new physics, but new physics coming from old-hat things like bouncing microwaves around seems awfully unlikely. It's conceivable that it does violate conservation laws, in which case we probably have to rebuild physics from the ground up. Still, until we explain it, we're going to be curious.
If you'll give me evidence that the bulk of voters consider new evidence dispassionately and on its merits, I might agree with you. Comey made a vague announcement that gave Trump a boost in the polls, despite the fact that what he was looking at had nothing useful for the Clinton investigation.
Some unions are corrupt. Not all of them. The ones that are corrupt tend to make the news.
Unions have done a tremendous amount to improve working conditions and pay for working-class people. They're more a blessing than a scam (although there's elements of both). Read some history.
Germany is heavily unionized, and seems to still have a functioning economy.
I'm not worried personally. I'm sufficiently old and have sufficient resources to have a good retirement if I'm laid off tomorrow. I'm working partly to get an even nicer retirement.
She talked about a younger workforce while laying off older workers. That's not something a competent CEO would ever say in the US, because it's evidence of age discrimination. No competent corporate officer would ever hint at hiring people of one race or religion or sex (except for bona fide reasons), and age is just as illegal to discriminate by.
The main components of mortgage payments are principal, interest, taxes, and insurance (PITI). If you have a fixed-rate mortgage, your total principal plus interest will stay the same, although the interest component will go down slowly (REAL slowly at the start of the mortgage) and the principal payment will go up accordingly. If you want to pay off the mortgage early, start sending extra payments immediately, to bring down the principal.
Taxes and insurance are not fixed. Check your bill to see where that extra $600 came from.
When individuals try to scam the system, I hear that judges are good at seeing through lame excuses. When companies try to scam the system, the judges seem to let them use dubious schemes.
So would internet nerds, at least if they could photoshop someone halfway presentable over Trump. His wives have been hot.
There's also the cold electoral calculus. If blacks are going to vote almost all Democrat anyway, they don't get a whole lot of practical love. If they'll get more votes per plausible promise from Hispanics, that's who they're going to go after.
In a negotiation, if you can't walk away, you're going to get screwed. If the Republicans started encouraging blacks, blacks would have a lot more political leverage. The Republicans are also throwing away support from groups that are generally religious conservatives because they insist on turning away minority groups.
The US system was not designed to avoid being dysfunctional. It also wasn't as well designed as it would have been with hindsight. The President was supposed to replace the King, on a temporary and elected basis. Kings were generally not officially partisans, although they might favor one party more than another. Many of the Founders didn't want political parties to form the way they did.
Personally, I think it was a darn good piece of work for when it happened and with such limited experience, but it has its flaws.
There is evidence that Russia is providing the emails through Wikileaks. The evidence I've got isn't conclusive, but flat claiming that Russia didn't do it suggests that the poster doesn't actually care about the evidence.
There's lots of Democrats who don't care that a bunch of Republicans call Clinton a treasonous criminal, lacking decent evidence for either treason or crime.
You're also casually assuming that US intelligence services are lying, and that for some reason Obama wants to provoke Russia. US intelligence services are not known for their honesty, and Presidents have done stupid things before, but you're assuming that Russia is innocuous (an odd conviction) and that Obama wants a war with Russia.
Your WWII history isn't any better. The Luftwaffe lost about the same number of planes in the Battle of France as the Battle of Britain, if I remember correctly, and nobody's accused the British of rolling over. France fell so fast because of General Gamelin's strategy, not any lack of fighting spirit, complicated by the problems with French armor and air doctrine. The French fought hard when they could fight, and improved their tactics as the battle went on.
Presidential directives are essentially orders to the executive branch on how to execute their duties, and have been issued by Presidents for a long time. Last I looked (a few years ago), you had to go back to Grover Cleveland to find a lower rate of directives. They do not carry the force of law.
Presidents have been committing acts of war without Congressional approval for a long time now. This isn't just a modern or a Democrat thing.
So you're willing to accept FBI announcements that fit with your world view happily, but reluctantly and half-heartedly if they disagree with your world view?
Because the Republicans don't generally do that sort of voter fraud. They have more efficient ways of rigging elections.
Standard practice at Standing Rock. I could have sworn that .38 handguns are not long thin cylinders made of wood.
The FBI has concluded that the additional emails they're looking at do not change their recommendation of no prosecution, so all of you email alarmists should back down. It's possible that other people may get into trouble from that investigation, but not Clinton.
Alternately, make it hard for groups that favor your opponents to vote. The Republican way.
It's not symbolic. It determines who the Electoral College votes for. The Electors haven't ignored the popular vote in my lifetime. There have been cases where the popular vote for a state was recorded incorrectly, by accident or design.
That sort of voter fraud is really inefficient. Making it hard for the people you dislike (typically ones who lean Democrat) is much more effective.
The IRS is likely to investigate a church if they engage in political activity, such as recommending a candidate or political party. It's constitutional.
I'm free and unarmed. That's one of the benefits of modern society.
That's a vampire cannibalism cult, not just a vampire cult. I don't think it's really a zombie cult, as it claims return to life rather than undeath.