Actually, I'm more of a distributist- one of the first things I noticed hacking Marxism is the problem of centralization. I'm for DECENTRALIZATION. Inidividual neighborhoods should be able to declare war on each other and set tarriffs and sales taxes that don't apply to local businesses. Tribalism is what we evolved to be!
No, I don't argue in any way against raising the wages in other countries. That's the natural consequence of globalization - everything reaches equilibrium.
But that's not the case so far with globalization- so far everybody's poorer- and the equilibrium we're headed for is the $.33/day wages.
The investments that US companies make into (relatively) high-paying jobs in, for example, India, spread more money around that economy. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Except for it's not. India has more poor people than ever instead- and the farmers are committing suicide because they can't compete with the cheap subsidized to below cost of raising it food we're sending there.
Protectionism, on the other hand, is a short term solution that helps no one but the people at the top. To believe otherwise is to go against all of human history.
Take a good look at human history before protectionism- it was feudalism. A very small minority were rich, and most were poor. That's what no protectionism will get you.
You need to retake Econ 150. That's not the "free market". This is the free market: everyone should be allowed to "cheat" by going anywhere -- except it's not cheating.
Depends on what you think the purpose of participating in an economy instead of just stealing from your neighbors is.
If a company can spend less to hire someone from India / Mexico / wherever, why on earth should we stop them?
Because economics has become warfare- and unless you want to be forced to worship Krishna, there's a reason why we have national sovereignity.
Why should they be forced to pay more money to hire someone from the US?
If they don't want to fine- exile them, take their assets, and let them go live in the third world. There's no need to accept them as citizens in that case.
This is utterly against the spirit of the free market.
Fine with me. If the free market is that you stab your neighbors in the back to earn more money, then I have no use for it at all.
In a completely free market, eventually wages for everybody doing a particular sort of job would end up about the same: as companies send work where it's cheapest, the local economy grows and thrives and the wages there will rise.
And as soon as wages rise, the companies will move elsewhere, the artificial bubble will burst, and the country will be in worse poverty than when they started. That's what is happening here in the United States anyway.
Now, many things conspire to make markets non-free: sometimes things as simple and nigh unto insurmountable as Geography, sometimes things as ugly as petty politics.
And I say these things SHOULD- markets never did any good for anybody.
Argue if you want that a free market is evil/bad/wrong. But recognize that any sort of visas and such are barriers to entry, and what you describe ("wages should be high because the skills are rare") is diametrically opposed to that: you are artificially limiting the supply by political machinations, almost exactly in the same way a monopolist can limit the supply of the product they can sell, in order to drive the price up so they can make the most profit.
As well they should. That's how you build a local economy- by fiercely keeping out foreign competition.
Claiming 'supply and demand' as a description of an artificial scarcity is intellectually dishonest.
Nothing artificial about this scarcity- historically corporations have always had to pay for training to get the skillsets they want. The fact that Americans aren't trained in the skillsets they want just shows that the corporations are no longer paying for the training.
Sure, there are overpaid CEOs out there,
I've never heard of one that wasn't. Well, that's not quite true- Les Schwab wasn't. But he actually understood that he had to train people in the skills he wanted- which is why he owns over 500 tire stores now and has to build 6 new ones a year to handle the promotions of highly skilled people.
but that fact has no bearing on the wages paid to programmers.
Bull- where do you think they get the extra money to pay themselves big? By cutting the wages of everybody else.
We may as well bring the wages paid to assembly line workers into the mix.
Absolutely, if there were any left. Face it, we ignored the problem while they all lost their jobs, now it's our turn.
You claimed class warfare was being committed, and you're right, but it's you that's declaring it.
I'm not the one laying people off to pay myself a larger salary.
The US is the only country that hires foreign skilled labour?
No, I don't give a rip what other countries do or don't do. I only care about the country I was born in. The rest of the world can die in nuclear fire as far as I care. The United States in the 1930s and 1940s enacted a series of laws that in the 1950s created the first real middle class- of anywhere in the world in any era. H-1bs and other guest workers are part of the class warfare to dismantle the middle class- and that is wrong.
I want the wait time to be 7 seconds. You should be able to sign up on a website from anywhere in the world, and after a credit & criminal background check in your home country and a simple boolean check on the availability of the visa, get a completely binding "Yes" or "No" that can't be appealed right there and then. You then proceed to apply under a different visa, or apply again for a green card, or whatever. There is no need for a human to intervene in this process- it should be totally automatic.
You're not allowed to "prove your salt", at least not easily. I was laid off with 8 years of industry experience in 2001. I was utterly ignored in the "spam out the resume" world. So I hitched on to my migraines as a disability, got my foot in the door contracting with the state, and after 2.5 years of proving myself as a contractor, I'll be getting my first real paycheck with benefits next month.
It took me 5 years to "prove my salt" all over again, despite having 8 years in the industry. I'm only now programming at the same skill level I was in 1999, having had to do all the crap jobs to prove my salt. You know NOTHING of the real world- you've been coddled. Hope you've kept up on your studying.
In America- we have this set of laws called the "Equal Opportunity Act". Bigotry of this sort shouldn't happen. It does because immigrants are easy to control and pay a fraction of the cost of an American.
In America, we have different classes of Visas available for different reasons. H-1b is INTENDED to allow American companies to hire people with Master's degrees or better who have skillsets not available in America. In practice, it's used to bring in as many Bachelor's Degree holders as possible every year to drive wages down in highly skilled jobs. It's so popular that businesses actually run out of these visas within a few minutes of them becoming available every year. Current cap is 65,000 per Federal Fiscal Year- they're usually gone by 20 minutes after midnight on the first of October.
The big part is that these visas were originally sold as having *no* effect on US employment- after all, the skillsets are supposed to be completely unavailable in the United States, and no way to train anybody in that skillset. In practice though- well, you see some of the quotes from advertising for these jobs.
And here I thought it was the country's responsibility to be loyal to the CEO's. They do make the biggest camapign contributions after all.
Loyalty is a two way street- a politician may be bought and paid for, but even he can't stop a bullet if you sabatoge the job market. These pirates masquarading as Americans these days on Wall Street don't seem to have the first clue about where their money comes from.
Actually, this is about the free market- wages should be as high as the skills are rare. You shouldn't be allowed to cheat by going elsewhere. Supply and demand baby. Nothing artificial about it- and if you want to whine about high wages, why not outsource the CEOs instead? After all, who do you think has the inflated salary, the guy making $48,000 a year or the guy making $480 million a year?
I'm a member- or rather was, I need to be again once I get my first permanent paycheck in 5 years. They also put out interesting technical articles in their newsletter- the idea is to create better programmers so that we can out-compete India on skills if not price. But it's hard when Free Traitors keep bringing in people to compete with the people already here.
Let's see the Free Traitors try to twist their way out of this one- an obvious abuse of the program based on bigotry and the Cheap Labor movement that wants everybody to work for the least wages possible. The Destruction of the Middle Class, wholesale- this is class warfare pure and simple.
From my point of view, CEOs who support this behavior need to be tried for Treason and shot. Then maybe we would get corporate managers that feel some LOYALTY to the country they were BORN IN instead of retiring off shore on the profits stolen from offshoring and inshoring to eliminate the unions.
In Oregon, a registered sex offender can be the 16-year-old who had sex with his 15 year old girlfriend, should the parents choose to prosecute. Means absolutely nothing in this case, other than the fact that if they find sexual material on his machine he's probably breaking his parole agreement.
That's fine for receiving the Caller ID- now have you ever seen a modem with TWO outputs that are switchable, so that you can send calls to either a landline phone or the answering machine, without making the landline ring? I've never seen such a modem.
I think you'd need a PBX system of some sort to do this. Something like http://www.smarthome.com/5217.HTML, but I don't specifically see the capability on this one, you'd need something more programmable.
I can't imagine the line of thinking that got you to produce that question - you might as well ask me why I think that women are sexually attractive or why I breath oxygen. The social nature of human beings is built into us, and part of that is the feeling of guilt and the desire to asuage it. And it doesn't matter to me if there's a greater purpose or not - I feel better when I'm forgiven, and that's a good enough reason to seek it out.
I'm autistic- I never quite understood "the social nature of human beings" because I simply do not share in it. So thank you for this answer- I'll chalk it up to just another of those "strange things Neurotypicals do to get along with each other".
On the other hand, if the only reason you do good things is because you get rewarded, you have (forgive me) a very shallow view of morality. It makes asking forgiveness like driving on one side of the road - one utterance from God and asking forgiveness is a sin, not a virtuous act.
From my point of view, all morality is EXACTLY that arbitrary and illogical. As for a shallow view- well, I see shallowness as the lies we tell each other to get along in society, and that hides quite a variety of sin.
Third, the fact that you group "us" with "humanity" and set them apart from "illigal aliens" is very disturbing.
Funny how you excuse the idea of forgiveness without reward under social lies just to get by- and then fail to understand bigotry as the center of all human social thought.
And that just seems odd to me, like trying to hide from children that junk food can be tasty. Sex, drugs, gambling and jogging can all be addictive, and doing them in an unsafe way or addiction to any one of them can kill you - but they all can be enjoyed safely in many different ways if proper precautions are taken.
Addictive substances should always be moderated. The traditional method of moderating sex has been marriage and heterosexuality. Other forms are most certainly unsafe.
Except that "abstanance only" doesn't reduce teen pregnancy, and the more anti-divorce parts of the US have higher divorce rates than the more liberal parts, and most contraception is used by married couples. I'm sorry, but what you're suggesting has already been tried, and hasn't had the effect you were expecting.
Traditional abstinence only programs have failed utterly to mention the commitment. Which is understandible- considering they were written by Protestants who believe in divorce. I find traditional abstinence only programs to be greatly lacking in telling the truth from even the abstinence point of view- they seem to be mainly "avoid the issue and let's see what happens when kids discover sex on their own"- which I'd agree, fails utterly.
For the most part, yes. I am not a nihilist. On the contrary, I see the improvement of human (and posthuman) capability, productivity, happiness, and quality of life, and the reduction of suffering, death, and inefficiency, as the ultimate purpose of life. If and when I die, I won't leave behind just a pile of biohazardous chemicals. I will also have left a positive mark, however small, on the world around me. Making a loved one laugh, helping a burdened stranger through a door, doing charitable work, or teaching strangers on Slashdot that being an atheist doesn't mean being a dour, cynical person all make the world a better place, and thus give meaning to life.
Ah, I see, I started out the dour, cynical person- and despite religion, still am. I think religion paints a roadmap to happiness WITHIN A GIVEN CLIMATE- and thus, despite being Catholic, many parts of Catholic/Christian history are rather distasteful to me, including the part that brought Catholicism to my Native American Ancestors (through infecting a large portion of the Pacific Northwest with Malaria in 1833.
Why would you care about the forgiveness of your fellow man if you *do* believe in God?
I don't. Never really have. What do my fellow men know? Their judgement is just as messed up as mine is, and equally biggoted, because that's the way evolution has wired us over the last three million years: To be a bunch of biggoted fools that never learn any better.
After all, the world is just a temporary thing to be endured. As long as you get right with God before you die, who cares about what the other people you may have made miserable think?
Ah, except, there's no way to be "right with God before you die". One either lives within God's teaching, or one doesn't, and if one doesn't, there ain't no second chances.
If they were good then they'll spend eternity basking in His glory anyway, and if they were bad then nothing you could possibly do to them in this life will mean a thing compared to the eternity of suffering that they've got in store for them, right?
Yes, but that's between them and whatever they've turned into THEIR God. Tibetan Book of the Dead.
No, of course not. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you try to be a good person in your day to day life, and that you do so not just because God will kick your ass if you don't, but because it's the right thing to do.
From my point of view, what would be right would be to have as much fun as possible while we're here. Without God, there is no right and wrong, there is no external morality at all. The concept of religion is the ONLY thing that brings "right and wrong" into our lives- and even then most of it only fits the climate the religion evolved in.
News flash: it's no different with atheists. Believe it or not, ethics and God can and do exist independent of each other. I was raised Roman Catholic and remained so well into adulthood, so I've seen both sides of the fence here. I used to imagine that atheists surely must be totally amoral, having no ultimate authority to answer to and no rigid ethical framework imposed upon them. As my faith in God waned (which happened gradually through introspection, thought, prayer (yes!) and research, not as a result of any particular trauma or negative event), I found that while my feelings on a couple of issues shifted (most notably contraception and other issues centering around the idea that sex for purposes other than procreation is somehow dirty and evil), for the most part nothing changed. Right and wrong are still right and wrong, and doing the right thing now actually seems more noble to me, as my motivations are genuinely ethical, rather than looking out for my own selfish interests vis-a-vis the divine carrot and stick.
Why would that be? Why are right and wrong still right and wrong at all? I went the opposite way you see, I started out assuming everybody thought as I did and my internal moral compass was enough- a few nights in jail after stabbing my supposed "best friend" began to clear that up- it took 20 years of research for me to see the Church was right all along.
You'll find that even without Heaven and Hell as motivating factors, most people do the right thing most of the time. Call me naive if you will, but in my experience people are strongly inclined toward good. Why? Because humans fare better in moderately cooperative social structures, hence nature selects for people who are predisposed toward being socially compatible with each other.
Actually, I see most people doing the wrong thing most of the time. I have no hope whatsoever that being "socially compatible" is enough- in fact, it's being socially compatible that usually leads us to do the WRONG thing, like killing our own children, rather than the right thing, like taking responsibility for having sex.
At the point when you die it won't matter to you. However, up until then I presume you want to make at least the people you care about happy, and want their happiness
I have to disagree - every atheist I've known says that their sense of moral obligation was increased by their lack of belief. Take a look at Penn Jillette's "This I Believe" essay [npr.org] on NPR, especially the part about "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O..." and "Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."
Why would I care about forgiveness if I didn't believe in God? Without an afterlife, it always ends the same way: $1.85 worth of chemicals slowly being refined out of a body in a box by natural methods, or $1.85 of ash in an urn. At that point, what does it matter if I was forgiven or not in this life?
I've never found a philosopher that I completely agree with, but I've learned something from all of them. Nietzche's idea that we should take control of our own destiny seems to hold some wisdom, but his overwhelming sense of dispair seems to be a result of his psychological problems, and I don't think that life is "pointless" the way he does.
Why would it have a point? Or let's put it another way- in abscence of a creator, what would be the point?
Now you're just mixing vaguely related ideas at random
Not at all. Contraception and abortion are about willingness to create the next generation of humanity; right now both of these are so large that we have to import 3 million illegal aliens a year just to reach something resembling zero population growth in the United States. Thus a duty to family and society would include being opposed to those- even the athiest George Orwell recognized that in _Keep the Aspiridistra Flying_. But more important, the original poster, who is not you, recognized a duty to SPECIES, which I took to mean the human species above other species, a concept any farmer or anybody who knows where their food comes from is both familiar and comfortable with.
Plenty of die-hard Christians are strong environmentalists, use contraception and get abortions and divorces.
Actually, being Roman Catholic and a follower of Papal theology, I consider them to be heretics; certainly NOT "Strong Christians", though possibly through no fault of their own (invincible ignorance also exists in Catholic theology, and unlike with secular civil law, is a valid defense).
Penn Jillette (our example atheist), has publicly stated that he would kill every chimpanzee on earth with his bare hands to save one person's life. I don't know any "divorce and abortion should be banned" atheists, most think that these are "best of a group of bad options" choices that should be kept as a last resort. As for contraception, there's only a very small (but very vocal) group people that don't like contraception in general, most people are only concerned about giving condoms to kids and questions about where the line between abortion and contraception is and other issues like that.
I personally don't think you should hand condoms to kids- and I draw the line at even teaching that sex can be recreational (now just TRY to keep that information from kids in the current culture of the United States! Rather, better, should be to teach that sex can be recreational, but that is an abuse, much like abusing oxycontin or any other proscribed drug; the real perscription of sex is for procreation, and done right, will hopefully result in you having to give a name to the occurance 9 months later and the total sex act lasting for 18-20 years, sometimes in parallel with other sex acts who have different names). I think that information, and treating teenagers more as adults, would go a long way to both reducing teen pregnancy AND reducing the divorce rate, as well as reducing contraception down to only the most drastic cases. Abstinence training with a twist, so to speak. That twist being truth
Belief in God and duty to family and future are not inseparable
Could have fooled me- seems that the first thing that gets jetisoned after belief in God (and sometimes before, and sometimes even causing) is duty to family and future- that is belief in the evils of contraception and abortion and divorce and not caring for one's parents. That last most of all- it seems that every athiest I meet has problems with a father or with grandparents lurking in their past.
In my own experience, I've found that as my belief in God faded my sense of obligation to benefit family, future, and species only increased.
Then you are unique- are you saying then that you don't believe in contraception and abortion, and are willing to sacrifice other species to see humanity get ahead? In other words, a socially CONSERVATIVE athiest?
I can't count on God to provide a happy future for all the good little boys and girls, so it's up to me to help make the future as positive as possible.
Interesting- so you'd disagree with Nietzche then?
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Actually, I'm more of a distributist- one of the first things I noticed hacking Marxism is the problem of centralization. I'm for DECENTRALIZATION. Inidividual neighborhoods should be able to declare war on each other and set tarriffs and sales taxes that don't apply to local businesses. Tribalism is what we evolved to be!
Heck, I'm for socialism in one NEIGHBORHOOD- violently defended.
I don't remember anybody having a problem finding a job under Clinton.
No, I don't argue in any way against raising the wages in other countries. That's the natural consequence of globalization - everything reaches equilibrium.
But that's not the case so far with globalization- so far everybody's poorer- and the equilibrium we're headed for is the $.33/day wages.
The investments that US companies make into (relatively) high-paying jobs in, for example, India, spread more money around that economy. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Except for it's not. India has more poor people than ever instead- and the farmers are committing suicide because they can't compete with the cheap subsidized to below cost of raising it food we're sending there.
Protectionism, on the other hand, is a short term solution that helps no one but the people at the top. To believe otherwise is to go against all of human history.
Take a good look at human history before protectionism- it was feudalism. A very small minority were rich, and most were poor. That's what no protectionism will get you.
You need to retake Econ 150. That's not the "free market". This is the free market: everyone should be allowed to "cheat" by going anywhere -- except it's not cheating.
Depends on what you think the purpose of participating in an economy instead of just stealing from your neighbors is.
If a company can spend less to hire someone from India / Mexico / wherever, why on earth should we stop them?
Because economics has become warfare- and unless you want to be forced to worship Krishna, there's a reason why we have national sovereignity.
Why should they be forced to pay more money to hire someone from the US?
If they don't want to fine- exile them, take their assets, and let them go live in the third world. There's no need to accept them as citizens in that case.
This is utterly against the spirit of the free market.
Fine with me. If the free market is that you stab your neighbors in the back to earn more money, then I have no use for it at all.
In a completely free market, eventually wages for everybody doing a particular sort of job would end up about the same: as companies send work where it's cheapest, the local economy grows and thrives and the wages there will rise.
And as soon as wages rise, the companies will move elsewhere, the artificial bubble will burst, and the country will be in worse poverty than when they started. That's what is happening here in the United States anyway.
Now, many things conspire to make markets non-free: sometimes things as simple and nigh unto insurmountable as Geography, sometimes things as ugly as petty politics.
And I say these things SHOULD- markets never did any good for anybody.
Argue if you want that a free market is evil/bad/wrong. But recognize that any sort of visas and such are barriers to entry, and what you describe ("wages should be high because the skills are rare") is diametrically opposed to that: you are artificially limiting the supply by political machinations, almost exactly in the same way a monopolist can limit the supply of the product they can sell, in order to drive the price up so they can make the most profit.
As well they should. That's how you build a local economy- by fiercely keeping out foreign competition.
How is going elsewhere cheating?
It's increasing the supply without paying for it.
Claiming 'supply and demand' as a description of an artificial scarcity is intellectually dishonest.
Nothing artificial about this scarcity- historically corporations have always had to pay for training to get the skillsets they want. The fact that Americans aren't trained in the skillsets they want just shows that the corporations are no longer paying for the training.
Sure, there are overpaid CEOs out there,
I've never heard of one that wasn't. Well, that's not quite true- Les Schwab wasn't. But he actually understood that he had to train people in the skills he wanted- which is why he owns over 500 tire stores now and has to build 6 new ones a year to handle the promotions of highly skilled people.
but that fact has no bearing on the wages paid to programmers.
Bull- where do you think they get the extra money to pay themselves big? By cutting the wages of everybody else.
We may as well bring the wages paid to assembly line workers into the mix.
Absolutely, if there were any left. Face it, we ignored the problem while they all lost their jobs, now it's our turn.
You claimed class warfare was being committed, and you're right, but it's you that's declaring it.
I'm not the one laying people off to pay myself a larger salary.
The US is the only country that hires foreign skilled labour?
No, I don't give a rip what other countries do or don't do. I only care about the country I was born in. The rest of the world can die in nuclear fire as far as I care. The United States in the 1930s and 1940s enacted a series of laws that in the 1950s created the first real middle class- of anywhere in the world in any era. H-1bs and other guest workers are part of the class warfare to dismantle the middle class- and that is wrong.
I want the wait time to be 7 seconds. You should be able to sign up on a website from anywhere in the world, and after a credit & criminal background check in your home country and a simple boolean check on the availability of the visa, get a completely binding "Yes" or "No" that can't be appealed right there and then. You then proceed to apply under a different visa, or apply again for a green card, or whatever. There is no need for a human to intervene in this process- it should be totally automatic.
You're not allowed to "prove your salt", at least not easily. I was laid off with 8 years of industry experience in 2001. I was utterly ignored in the "spam out the resume" world. So I hitched on to my migraines as a disability, got my foot in the door contracting with the state, and after 2.5 years of proving myself as a contractor, I'll be getting my first real paycheck with benefits next month.
It took me 5 years to "prove my salt" all over again, despite having 8 years in the industry. I'm only now programming at the same skill level I was in 1999, having had to do all the crap jobs to prove my salt. You know NOTHING of the real world- you've been coddled. Hope you've kept up on your studying.
In America- we have this set of laws called the "Equal Opportunity Act". Bigotry of this sort shouldn't happen. It does because immigrants are easy to control and pay a fraction of the cost of an American.
ANY enforcement would be an improvement- but the Bush Admin is against actually enforcing the law when it is inconvient.
In America, we have different classes of Visas available for different reasons. H-1b is INTENDED to allow American companies to hire people with Master's degrees or better who have skillsets not available in America. In practice, it's used to bring in as many Bachelor's Degree holders as possible every year to drive wages down in highly skilled jobs. It's so popular that businesses actually run out of these visas within a few minutes of them becoming available every year. Current cap is 65,000 per Federal Fiscal Year- they're usually gone by 20 minutes after midnight on the first of October.
The big part is that these visas were originally sold as having *no* effect on US employment- after all, the skillsets are supposed to be completely unavailable in the United States, and no way to train anybody in that skillset. In practice though- well, you see some of the quotes from advertising for these jobs.
And here I thought it was the country's responsibility to be loyal to the CEO's. They do make the biggest camapign contributions after all.
Loyalty is a two way street- a politician may be bought and paid for, but even he can't stop a bullet if you sabatoge the job market. These pirates masquarading as Americans these days on Wall Street don't seem to have the first clue about where their money comes from.
Actually, this is about the free market- wages should be as high as the skills are rare. You shouldn't be allowed to cheat by going elsewhere. Supply and demand baby. Nothing artificial about it- and if you want to whine about high wages, why not outsource the CEOs instead? After all, who do you think has the inflated salary, the guy making $48,000 a year or the guy making $480 million a year?
I'm a member- or rather was, I need to be again once I get my first permanent paycheck in 5 years. They also put out interesting technical articles in their newsletter- the idea is to create better programmers so that we can out-compete India on skills if not price. But it's hard when Free Traitors keep bringing in people to compete with the people already here.
Let's see the Free Traitors try to twist their way out of this one- an obvious abuse of the program based on bigotry and the Cheap Labor movement that wants everybody to work for the least wages possible. The Destruction of the Middle Class, wholesale- this is class warfare pure and simple.
From my point of view, CEOs who support this behavior need to be tried for Treason and shot. Then maybe we would get corporate managers that feel some LOYALTY to the country they were BORN IN instead of retiring off shore on the profits stolen from offshoring and inshoring to eliminate the unions.
In Oregon, a registered sex offender can be the 16-year-old who had sex with his 15 year old girlfriend, should the parents choose to prosecute. Means absolutely nothing in this case, other than the fact that if they find sexual material on his machine he's probably breaking his parole agreement.
That's fine for receiving the Caller ID- now have you ever seen a modem with TWO outputs that are switchable, so that you can send calls to either a landline phone or the answering machine, without making the landline ring? I've never seen such a modem.
I think you'd need a PBX system of some sort to do this. Something like http://www.smarthome.com/5217.HTML, but I don't specifically see the capability on this one, you'd need something more programmable.
I can't imagine the line of thinking that got you to produce that question - you might as well ask me why I think that women are sexually attractive or why I breath oxygen. The social nature of human beings is built into us, and part of that is the feeling of guilt and the desire to asuage it. And it doesn't matter to me if there's a greater purpose or not - I feel better when I'm forgiven, and that's a good enough reason to seek it out.
I'm autistic- I never quite understood "the social nature of human beings" because I simply do not share in it. So thank you for this answer- I'll chalk it up to just another of those "strange things Neurotypicals do to get along with each other".
On the other hand, if the only reason you do good things is because you get rewarded, you have (forgive me) a very shallow view of morality. It makes asking forgiveness like driving on one side of the road - one utterance from God and asking forgiveness is a sin, not a virtuous act.
From my point of view, all morality is EXACTLY that arbitrary and illogical. As for a shallow view- well, I see shallowness as the lies we tell each other to get along in society, and that hides quite a variety of sin.
Third, the fact that you group "us" with "humanity" and set them apart from "illigal aliens" is very disturbing.
Funny how you excuse the idea of forgiveness without reward under social lies just to get by- and then fail to understand bigotry as the center of all human social thought.
And that just seems odd to me, like trying to hide from children that junk food can be tasty. Sex, drugs, gambling and jogging can all be addictive, and doing them in an unsafe way or addiction to any one of them can kill you - but they all can be enjoyed safely in many different ways if proper precautions are taken.
Addictive substances should always be moderated. The traditional method of moderating sex has been marriage and heterosexuality. Other forms are most certainly unsafe.
Except that "abstanance only" doesn't reduce teen pregnancy, and the more anti-divorce parts of the US have higher divorce rates than the more liberal parts, and most contraception is used by married couples. I'm sorry, but what you're suggesting has already been tried, and hasn't had the effect you were expecting.
Traditional abstinence only programs have failed utterly to mention the commitment. Which is understandible- considering they were written by Protestants who believe in divorce. I find traditional abstinence only programs to be greatly lacking in telling the truth from even the abstinence point of view- they seem to be mainly "avoid the issue and let's see what happens when kids discover sex on their own"- which I'd agree, fails utterly.
For the most part, yes. I am not a nihilist. On the contrary, I see the improvement of human (and posthuman) capability, productivity, happiness, and quality of life, and the reduction of suffering, death, and inefficiency, as the ultimate purpose of life. If and when I die, I won't leave behind just a pile of biohazardous chemicals. I will also have left a positive mark, however small, on the world around me. Making a loved one laugh, helping a burdened stranger through a door, doing charitable work, or teaching strangers on Slashdot that being an atheist doesn't mean being a dour, cynical person all make the world a better place, and thus give meaning to life.
Ah, I see, I started out the dour, cynical person- and despite religion, still am. I think religion paints a roadmap to happiness WITHIN A GIVEN CLIMATE- and thus, despite being Catholic, many parts of Catholic/Christian history are rather distasteful to me, including the part that brought Catholicism to my Native American Ancestors (through infecting a large portion of the Pacific Northwest with Malaria in 1833.
Why would you care about the forgiveness of your fellow man if you *do* believe in God?
I don't. Never really have. What do my fellow men know? Their judgement is just as messed up as mine is, and equally biggoted, because that's the way evolution has wired us over the last three million years: To be a bunch of biggoted fools that never learn any better.
After all, the world is just a temporary thing to be endured. As long as you get right with God before you die, who cares about what the other people you may have made miserable think?
Ah, except, there's no way to be "right with God before you die". One either lives within God's teaching, or one doesn't, and if one doesn't, there ain't no second chances.
If they were good then they'll spend eternity basking in His glory anyway, and if they were bad then nothing you could possibly do to them in this life will mean a thing compared to the eternity of suffering that they've got in store for them, right?
Yes, but that's between them and whatever they've turned into THEIR God. Tibetan Book of the Dead.
No, of course not. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you try to be a good person in your day to day life, and that you do so not just because God will kick your ass if you don't, but because it's the right thing to do.
From my point of view, what would be right would be to have as much fun as possible while we're here. Without God, there is no right and wrong, there is no external morality at all. The concept of religion is the ONLY thing that brings "right and wrong" into our lives- and even then most of it only fits the climate the religion evolved in.
News flash: it's no different with atheists. Believe it or not, ethics and God can and do exist independent of each other. I was raised Roman Catholic and remained so well into adulthood, so I've seen both sides of the fence here. I used to imagine that atheists surely must be totally amoral, having no ultimate authority to answer to and no rigid ethical framework imposed upon them. As my faith in God waned (which happened gradually through introspection, thought, prayer (yes!) and research, not as a result of any particular trauma or negative event), I found that while my feelings on a couple of issues shifted (most notably contraception and other issues centering around the idea that sex for purposes other than procreation is somehow dirty and evil), for the most part nothing changed. Right and wrong are still right and wrong, and doing the right thing now actually seems more noble to me, as my motivations are genuinely ethical, rather than looking out for my own selfish interests vis-a-vis the divine carrot and stick.
Why would that be? Why are right and wrong still right and wrong at all? I went the opposite way you see, I started out assuming everybody thought as I did and my internal moral compass was enough- a few nights in jail after stabbing my supposed "best friend" began to clear that up- it took 20 years of research for me to see the Church was right all along.
You'll find that even without Heaven and Hell as motivating factors, most people do the right thing most of the time. Call me naive if you will, but in my experience people are strongly inclined toward good. Why? Because humans fare better in moderately cooperative social structures, hence nature selects for people who are predisposed toward being socially compatible with each other.
Actually, I see most people doing the wrong thing most of the time. I have no hope whatsoever that being "socially compatible" is enough- in fact, it's being socially compatible that usually leads us to do the WRONG thing, like killing our own children, rather than the right thing, like taking responsibility for having sex.
At the point when you die it won't matter to you. However, up until then I presume you want to make at least the people you care about happy, and want their happiness
I have to disagree - every atheist I've known says that their sense of moral obligation was increased by their lack of belief. Take a look at Penn Jillette's "This I Believe" essay [npr.org] on NPR, especially the part about "Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O..." and "Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around."
Why would I care about forgiveness if I didn't believe in God? Without an afterlife, it always ends the same way: $1.85 worth of chemicals slowly being refined out of a body in a box by natural methods, or $1.85 of ash in an urn. At that point, what does it matter if I was forgiven or not in this life?
I've never found a philosopher that I completely agree with, but I've learned something from all of them. Nietzche's idea that we should take control of our own destiny seems to hold some wisdom, but his overwhelming sense of dispair seems to be a result of his psychological problems, and I don't think that life is "pointless" the way he does.
Why would it have a point? Or let's put it another way- in abscence of a creator, what would be the point?
Now you're just mixing vaguely related ideas at random
Not at all. Contraception and abortion are about willingness to create the next generation of humanity; right now both of these are so large that we have to import 3 million illegal aliens a year just to reach something resembling zero population growth in the United States. Thus a duty to family and society would include being opposed to those- even the athiest George Orwell recognized that in _Keep the Aspiridistra Flying_. But more important, the original poster, who is not you, recognized a duty to SPECIES, which I took to mean the human species above other species, a concept any farmer or anybody who knows where their food comes from is both familiar and comfortable with.
Plenty of die-hard Christians are strong environmentalists, use contraception and get abortions and divorces.
Actually, being Roman Catholic and a follower of Papal theology, I consider them to be heretics; certainly NOT "Strong Christians", though possibly through no fault of their own (invincible ignorance also exists in Catholic theology, and unlike with secular civil law, is a valid defense).
Penn Jillette (our example atheist), has publicly stated that he would kill every chimpanzee on earth with his bare hands to save one person's life. I don't know any "divorce and abortion should be banned" atheists, most think that these are "best of a group of bad options" choices that should be kept as a last resort. As for contraception, there's only a very small (but very vocal) group people that don't like contraception in general, most people are only concerned about giving condoms to kids and questions about where the line between abortion and contraception is and other issues like that.
I personally don't think you should hand condoms to kids- and I draw the line at even teaching that sex can be recreational (now just TRY to keep that information from kids in the current culture of the United States! Rather, better, should be to teach that sex can be recreational, but that is an abuse, much like abusing oxycontin or any other proscribed drug; the real perscription of sex is for procreation, and done right, will hopefully result in you having to give a name to the occurance 9 months later and the total sex act lasting for 18-20 years, sometimes in parallel with other sex acts who have different names). I think that information, and treating teenagers more as adults, would go a long way to both reducing teen pregnancy AND reducing the divorce rate, as well as reducing contraception down to only the most drastic cases. Abstinence training with a twist, so to speak. That twist being truth
Belief in God and duty to family and future are not inseparable
Could have fooled me- seems that the first thing that gets jetisoned after belief in God (and sometimes before, and sometimes even causing) is duty to family and future- that is belief in the evils of contraception and abortion and divorce and not caring for one's parents. That last most of all- it seems that every athiest I meet has problems with a father or with grandparents lurking in their past.
In my own experience, I've found that as my belief in God faded my sense of obligation to benefit family, future, and species only increased.
Then you are unique- are you saying then that you don't believe in contraception and abortion, and are willing to sacrifice other species to see humanity get ahead? In other words, a socially CONSERVATIVE athiest?
I can't count on God to provide a happy future for all the good little boys and girls, so it's up to me to help make the future as positive as possible.
Interesting- so you'd disagree with Nietzche then?
That certainly depends on your point of view, and I guess if you're anti-child, the choice becomes automatic.