Did you read the actual pdf report from the government on this?
1) lots of name dropping, lots of this senator is pushing to get this stuff looked at. 2) it was initially requested iirc in June to be completed no later than October and then pushed back to November (ie we don't really care about this and are dragging our feet) 3) it is liberally interspersed with pop culture references and song lyrics (I shit you not) to keep the attention of the readers (idiot australian politicians) and to impress upon them the important of space, technology and science in general.
These three points alone are enough to summarise the situation quite well, but the basic takeaway point for this entire debacle is that Australia is a shithole.
I live here, I know this.
We waste tons of money on shit like the australian institute of sport, provide inordinate amounts of media attention to useless shit, and basically ignore our entire sci/tech sector, about a year ago I heard one snippet from a US media source on a tech created in an australian labratory to drastically increase the production of energy producing refined uranium using lasers instead of the current contemporary gas centrifuge technology. I have hardly heard about it at all since, maybe five or six times, and never once has it even been mentioned in australian media.
This country exists to churn out petty bullshit about sport and celebrity and feel good about our half assed left wing touchy feely hug the environment protect the children ain't life in australia grand bullshit, expatriate me as soon as possible to Switzerland or someplace sensible.
This continuously confuses me.
So you've created a system to achieve a particular goal, let's say you made yourself a router out of an old 386 box back in 1995 and whacked two ethernet cards and a 56k modem in the system to serve as a rudimentary firewall for research purposes.
As time goes by, do you continue to maintain your esoteric and outdated bygone relic of prior eras, because that's the way that it's always been done? The obvious answer is that no, you replace it with some other technology better suited to meeting the goal of the original system, either a virtual system on a higher powered computer that you can sandbox with or a cheap wrt54g router attached to a dsl2 line for internet access, or probably both if you're anything like me.
We're engineers, hackers, technical masters, call us what you will, but we have a particular philosophy that always seemed to be fundamentally disconnected to that of the everyday sheeple that make up the vast majority of the human population, engaging in meaningless ritual to placate some imagined deity and achieve a circumspect goal related only vaguely to the actual action in question as almost the sole defining factor of their lives.
Why here though, are we just the same? Our bodies are just machines, like the tools and creations we tinker and modify without care as to ritual, and yet we insist on behaving just like the plebs when it comes to this facet of our lives, going through the ritual of diet and exercise to achieve the goal of health. Yes it works, rebooting the computer often works too, or turning an option off in the bios, or tweaking a setting to skip an iteration of a loop resulting in a segfault, but all of these things are simply ritual rather than engineering, and I'd assume of all audiences, this would be keenly aware of that fact and pursue alternative avenues?
Where is the genetic engineering? Basal metabolic rate restructuring, genuine "I don't want to waste time on bullshit like jumping up and down when I could be writing code, but I don't want to die of a heart attack before I can accomplish what I'm aiming for either" type entries? Who has retrofitted a virus with genetic mods to delay insulin release or some weird stuff like that?
what specifically do you regard as "strong" evidence for the supernatural claims which your religion is based upon? I'd like to say something specifically that I have in mind but the simple fact is the bible is just rife with things which defy common sense, at which point do you claim these become historical and on what evidence do you base this view?
So am I to take it from this statement that with regards to that long, hard, thinking session I asked you to undertake approximately two years ago, you've abandoned fideism and now are back to claiming historicity for the origins of your faith?
Or something you might want to consider, also, is that you're trying to explain the evolution of an organ that does not actually exist.
Read the article closely, it actually talks about specific areas of the brain that are primarily used for other purposes displaying unusual activity when the reported "religious experiences" are taking place, such as the sense of oneness with the universe being felt when they deactivate their spatial awareness functionality.
In this sense, the only organ involved is the brain, and the only function being exercised is the impairment of another function, which is not in itself an actual altogether seperate function.
The religious seem to be conveniently ignoring this fact and trying to spin the report as "god's phone to your brain". By trying to explain the evolution of the "phone" mechanism, you're kind of playing into their hands.
I get it, you're working on something and you're trying to concentrate, come up with the next block of code for an intricate function, and some popup email notification for shonky viagra salesman comes up and throws your concentration a little, annoying.
I don't however think that the best solution is to "unplug" so to speak, because I've had the reverse to, deeply entranced in something complex for hours on end, only to find out that it was useless work because I was emailed twenty minutes into the task and notified we'd be taking a different task, that is similiarily annoying.
It'd be ideal if you could set the computer to know what you're working on, say a project tag for incoming communication attempts, and anything related to what you were working on got through instantly with the potential for interruption otherwise it was stowed away without notification until later. I achieve this now just by making assumptions about who will be contacting me with regards to what, but it's a kludge, and the people you expect to not bug you with something unless it's important aren't always worthy of such faith.
A way to let people know that need to know what you're working on without interrupting you, and giving them the potential to interrupt you if they really ought to anyway, that'd be nice. Unplugging is just taking a step back, and there was a good reason we got to where we are to begin with.
When you speak bullshit, then I'm going to call bullshit. However, if you've noticed, I then go on to explain WHY it is bullshit. It appears that your false indignation hides the fact that you have no rebuttal for my explanations.
I don't care that you disagree with me, that's fine, I'm simply pointing out it's a waste of my time to bother engaging you in civilised discussion when you drop lines like this in the heat of your tantrums;
You'd think someone were trying to take your candy. Quit whining like a little girl.
I still have no intention of continuing the discussion with you, I just wanted to make it perfectly clear precisely why I view you an ill mannered buffoon not worth the consideration necessary to continue a serious discussion with you, just in case you want to avoid being classified as such again, I advise you to read this;
You come close to a compelling argument, you show why public healthcare is a good, obviously, but you fail to draw a line to justifying it's finance by extorted money.
To put it another way, say I'm a self involved human with nothing beyond my rational self interest and desire to make as much money as possible, not to the point that you're doing things of questionable morality, but that you're providing goods or services at the highest price the market will bear and your competitors will allow. Where's my motivation to enter medicine / biotech and add to the forward momentum of the field? Make new discoveries, become a competitive entity amongst other competitive entities and drive prices down and quality up?
Living in a welfare state, by definition, removes that incentive, any money or portion thereof that you earn from anything may well be simply taken away at the convenience of the state, if all I give a damn about is myself, why even work at all? Why not choose the path of least resistance? Taxation and government makes that path a reprehensible one in my view, gaming the welfare system in order to pay for your livelihood and doing nothing more, forever. Why put in any effort if the proceeds thereof will be continuously plundered, and the harder you paddle the faster the current gets? What rational objective reason?
We live in a world ruled and dominated by thieves, why provide them with anything to thieve from you? What other reason than wishy washy hug the children mantra can you honestly provide?
It comes down to this, at the end of the day, if a robber attempts to rob me in the streets at gun or knifepoint, I will, if I choose to pay him, pay him *only* because of his knife or gun, I don't give a fuck if he's robbing me for his next heroin fix or if he's robbing me to donate to UNICEF, he is a thief, if given half the opportunity I'd gladly kill him in order to remove him from my path far more readily than pay him. The same applies to the government and taxation, the only reason I pay is because I fear their guns, I don't care what moral justification they seek to venture in order to backup their blatant theft, it doesn't change the act from what it is.
I'm not going to bother considering continuing a serious discussion with someone as ill mannered as you have demonstrated you are, suffice to say getting upset and cursing at people when you're wrong is no more effective than seperating your vaunted government departments and then allaying blame away from certain sectors thereof onto other sectors of the same whole and thus claiming the whole is somehow guiltless.
All I can say is if most Americans are like you, I suppose you deserve what you get with regards to your approval of your military and foreign policies.
I think the parameters of the outlined organisation should be limited by voluntary contract, and paid for in kind.
As for moving anywhere else, I've considered it, I live in Australia, not America, and we're even more fond of tax than you guys, but the simple fact is this, perhaps the best nations in the world in terms of small, efficient government with low to no tax are not places where I've lived my life so far, I have not spent eleven years already working there, investing in a social network, etc etc etc, I have not spent eleven years forcibly being robbed of my income by those governments and thus have not come to either expect anything from them or resent them for the damage they've already done and wish to take it out of their hide in kind.
That being said, it's also incredibly impractical to simply move governments everytime you disagree with a policy, even the best of nations are far from perfect, such as switzerland, andorra, lichtenstein or vanuatu. A better long term solution is probably something like http://www.seastead.org/ I'm currently just taking a wait and see approach, but I assure you as soon as a viable alternative to modern slavery becomes available, I'll be there.
And that money goes to pay for things like roads, police, health care, firedepartments, military, social services, regulatory bodies. These are all CRITICAL features of a modern society. It's not theft, you're paying for services. Everyone is benefitting from them, everyone needs to pay.
Your examples of features from which everyone is benefitting are mostly addressed here;
The same applies to all the others as well, in fact I can think of little in the way of a service, beyond *maybe* a military, that could not be better provided through a private user pays and voluntary participation scheme, without the possibility of the accusation of theft being levelled at it.
If you didn't pay for this through taxes you'd be paying private industry. Inefficient as government is, you only have to look at US healthcare to see that private industry can be even worse.
Your country is only third in line when it comes to public spending on healthcare, furthermore what right do you have to a doctor's time or a drug companies medicine? A popular appeal for modern politicians for the essential nature of public health is precisely because people fear death and they want as long a life as possible, this doesn't necessarily make it anyone else's responsibility to help you achieve that goal.
Would medicine as a field advance so rapidly if it were mandated that no profit could ever be made from it? Where do most of the advances in modern medicine originate? That's right, the US pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, companies that work for profit, the same organisations that you're currently so dismissive of as in need of reform.
They don't owe you or me anything, and attempts at the legislative level to try and force them to comply with this perceived duty of care are just as likely to hobble innovation and motivation in their fields as allow access to high quality healthcare for every last person that believes it to be their divine right.
It's an online handle. I'm no more communist than you are ethereal.
Well I'm glad to hear you don't identify as communist, but I think we can fairly safely say that you are in fact quite a lot more communist than me, about (insert effective tax rate here) percent more communist.;)
Partially, yes, directly proportional to the degree to which you are taxed, in fact;
Slavery can mean one or more related conditions which involve control of a person against his or her will, enforced by violence or other forms of coercion.
I would agree if you got nothing of worth in return. For your money, you get a stable government, a large military to protect our interests, a modern highway system, jails to keep criminals from your belongings and family, etc.
A typical defense, but lets examine it more closely;
* A stable government.
I don't know directly to what you refer to here, but I'd point out that the government has the potential to change every four years, perhaps you mean they won't be too tyrannical to their subjects, but with the blatant disregard for the constitution illustrated with such modern law as the PATRIOT act and the DMCA, I question the validity of that point. Perhaps you mean that they're stable in the sense that they won't indulge in foreign expansionism and nation building, playing world cop, sticking their nose in where it's not wanted...
Oops, no, not that either.
Would this apply equally to a mafioso crime family ruling a city? Well, yes, up to the extent that others fight with them for control of the territory of the city, much as the current war between the terrorists and the government rages with plenty of innocent life lost on both the side of the US and it's perceived enemy nation states.
Can you draw me one example of how this point is in fact anything more than mafioso lite, sugarcoated and cleverly marketted? Keep in mind that Burma, Cuba, China, until very recently Iraq, and Syria have also had a "stable government" before pushing this any further.
* a modern highway system
Seems that the questionable worth and fairly indisputable bloat of the Interstate highway system is a poor defense to the degree to which you are taxed, what of those of us who have no need for such a road? Is it still acceptable that we be forced at the point of a gun to pay for it? Further note the figure of 72% of funding for the highway taken from direct "user-pays" types of tax on fuel and associated items, it doesn't go far to validating the wholesale plunder of the general population to the level of the modern tax system when 72% of the infrastructure in question here is in fact funded directly by the users thereof.
Furthermore, keep in mind that government projects are notoriously inefficient compared to their private counterparts, consider the amount of funding spent on the system in it's current incarnation compared to what could have been achieved in a completely voluntary commercial project.
If you didn't have such a large military sprawled out all over the world with it's fingers in the various pies of other nation states globally, oftentimes seen as meddling, sometimes leading to direct hostile action on your home country civilians, it'd be questionable how worthwhile this asset is from a standpoint of attempting to minimise invasion of your country, take note;
Of the countries in the lower half of global military expenditure, how many have been unsuccessful in defending their own borders? (Hint: they all still exist).
Yes, you have a really big sword, no, it's not doing you any good, in fact, more often than not, you are hitting yourself with it.
* jails to keep criminals from your belongings and family
I can't believe you're honestly positing your prison system as an asset worth paying for, do you really want to go down this path? I'll give you an option to reconsider, keeping in mind the following;
The problem is something is basically that tax cuts tend to disproportionately favour the rich, and by rich I'm not talking $50K or $100K. But $1M+. Or even $10M+. Of the $X amount of money the government lost in tax revenue, something like 1/3X or 1/2X came from the top couple percent of people, the ubber-wealthy.
Sorry, but I remain unconvinced by these figures, that still means that if the cut in was at something much lower, say around the 100k mark, the largest percentage of lost tax revenue would by necessity come from those far higher up than 100k due to the fact that they're putting so much in. I really wanted to know the exact nature of the tax cuts, where were the margins moved, what was changed?
What would be beneficial is a more balanced form of progressive taxation that doesn't put the highest tax bracket at a low sum of $50K or $70K. Because someone earning $50K shouldn't be taxed the same as someone at $50M. Perhaps something like 40% at $100K, 50% at $1M, then 0.5% per $1M more.
40% of your earnings on a 100k salary? so to put this another way 40% of your time wasted in slave labour to a central government authority you do not exercise direct control over? Serious question, how can you possibly promote such blatant theft?
People always say that taxing the super-rich will discourage people. Which is bullshit. I recall reading that in the US in 40s/50s/60s, the highest effective tax-rate was around 95%. Did that deter people or hinder the economy? Hell no, it was probably the greatest period of growth in US history.
I care less that it would discourage people than the fact that it's just plain wrong, taxation is theft, *especially* to the degree to which it is prevalent in modern life. As far as the economic period you mention there, I question both the validity of the 95% figure as well as point out that any increase in production or economy could easily be attributed to wartime more than high taxes.
Then again, you are a communist, I assume, and all of this is fairly par for the course for your ilk, yes?
How exactly did Bush's tax cuts work to only benefit the top 1%? A little background here, I'm actually from Australia myself, here we have tax coming out our ears, our income tax is disgraceful, 48.5% cutting in at around 70k$ AUD (which is about 50k$ USD). On top of that corporations pay a flat tax of 30%, there's a 10% GST on just about everything, and there is barely a large purchase / transfer you can make without having to pay a large stamp duty or government regulated fee in some way shape or form.
So here, when someone typically talks of a "tax cut for the rich" it's cutting out that 48.5% top of the line income tax bracket, which would suit me just fine, I'm of the opinion that when it comes down to it between all the taxes on Australians there must truly be a very small amount of real actual money that isn't seized by the government on transfer.
How does it work in the US? With the tax cuts that so many seem to complain about for the rich, did he honestly just rig it to only touch that top 1% of all taxpayers? Educate me, if you please, I'd be intrigued to hear.
And so your solution is dealing with them via laws and regulations, the very stick they weild so successfully against everyone else? Isn't this akin to trying to drown a fish in water?
How about we all just put the stick away?
I'm not disputing the fact that a lot of people have a lot of money they never lifted a finger to earn, I'm simply pointing out that there are plenty of people, myself included, who worked our way up from absolutely nothing and don't take kindly to being pilfered of our earnings by a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy.
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to fund tax cuts for the rich is extremely bad policy.
Not to rain on your parade or anything here but would these statements be true also;
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to meet the military expenditure budget is extremely bad policy.
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to fund social security is extremely bad policy.
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to fund (pork barrel public project of choice) is extremely bad policy.
Also, would your original statement if rephrased like this;
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit just because we don't feel like plundering our more productive citizens hand over fist anymore is extremely bad policy.
Or let's say that they don't, and you're talking about the meanest form of modern corporate exploitation possible, for argument's sake lets say Nike hiring south east asian sweatshops for garment manufacturing, surely this is a heinous crime which can be unequivocally written off as the purest example of concentrated evil, right?
But what about;
According to a UNICEF study an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the U.S. banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterence Act was introduced in the US as estimated 50,000 children were dimissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," --"all of them more hazardous and exploitatitive than garment production" according to the UNICEF study. [1]
This?
A lot of people seem to be viewing the american job drain from a vacuum, I too am a coder and a sysadmin and I admit in my more primitive moments the same sense of panic and dismay strikes me when I ponder how I can compete with someone willing to do the same work as I am for 40$ per day, but the thing is you're not taking into account the entire equation.
A bunch of jobs go to india, there's less money in the domestic economy to spend on necessities of life, even if this is limited to a degree by government economic controls or other inefficient controls on natural reality, it can still be said to be a significant drain, so what's the result of the drop in demand for higher priced housing and goods? Those prices drop, also, they simply *have* to, if noone is buying them then it makes no sense for the businesses involved to maintain an unrealistic pricing structure and not actually get paid for their goods / services. The end result is a slow equilibrium being imposed upon the entire globalised economy, prices drop in the overpriced areas to match the decreased demand and raise in the underpriced areas to deal with the increased demand.
So what am I getting at? If you want someone to shout at, shout at the people making your life such a ridiculously high cost, your goods and service providers and the government that sucks the lifeblood from both you and them.
What about changing your mind? Isn't it a little stubborn to stick to your originally stated position regardless of coming to think of things in a different light?
http://www.ssca.org/sscabb/index.php?action=vthr ea d&forum=1&topic=449
SSCA is seven seas cruising association, that's a direct link to my initial proposal on the site, but the main forums are good for pretty much any subject you care to think of.
Sailnet has a lot of interesting articles with relation to pretty much any subject you could imagine, and last but not least
http://www.seastead.org
Which is not directly related to sailboat cruising, but holds *reams* of data for the technically minded with regards to what to expect from a life at sea.
You purchase it, via an ancient method known as trade, unless you're positing that you need rely on any specific political or social structure in order to have a good produced in order that it may be procured by trade, by that logic, ancient civilisation was entirely reliant on chinese imperial culture for the consumption of silk? Please acquire a clue, this is not a fact, It doesn't require that there be the precise infrastructure that currently exists in order to provide any of the necessary things for onboard living.
I've already rented a boat with friends for a few weeks and none of it was enormously complicated, in fact that degree to which it was automated and an extension of computerised navigation systems was intriguing to me, I am well aware of the fact that such systems cannot be entirely relied upon 100% of the time, but I am also well aware of the fact that they serve a genuine purpose, otherwise, they would not exist at all.
Furthermore, fuel is a very sparsely used commodity on a sailing yacht, as motive power is provided by the wind and the majority of shipboard power provided by renewable means such as solar and wind based energy generation, so even if it were entirely true that you needed to rely on the infrastructure of general civilisation in order to procure any of these goods, sign some contract in the belief of the moral validity of modern government and society in order to have the right to partake in any form of trade and tithe your earnings in kind, this would *still* be to a very small degree.
If my vessel caught fire and sank in the middle of the pacific ocean, I wouldn't expect anyone to come and save me, I would expect to die, I am not afflicted with the sense of entitlement you seem to attribute to me purely by my nature as a human being, I realise that's rare and likely not the case for yourself, from the way you've come across, but I assure you there are others just like me.
I've wanted to do something similiar on a small scale for a *long* time now, I run my own consultancy and do most of my work for clients remotely, there's no real reason I need to be land based to do any of that stuff, so I started looking into maybe buying a houseboat on a local river, with the advent of wireless internet it was entirely practical to do so, and I thought that I could travel up and down the river and drop anchor closer to clients and thus have a shorter commute in the event that I ever did need to make onsite visits. That turned out to be a fairly feasible idea with no obvious gotchas, you run diesel generators for excess power requirements with a large battery pack hooked up to solar and wind generators, and you're fairly self sufficient when it comes to low end energy requirements.
This is from a twenty five year old guy that had lived all his life on land, and I have to say I consider myself a fairly practical person, so something about the entire idea just kept hitting me the wrong way, it had that "no, this is pie in the sky, it can't happen" feeling to it, and I just couldn't figure out why. I went into dramatic levels of detail in speccing out the lifestyle, you can purchase water generators which will create freshwater from seawater using nothing but energy (provided from the aforementioned power infrastructure) and there's plenty of storage room in a houseboat for food, which is pretty much the only thing you cannot harvest directly from your immediate environment.
That last statement triggered my attention and I thought, well, what about the ocean? What does it really take to make ocean passages on the high seas? or even just clinging to the eastern coast of Australia? If all the provisioning you've done so far works for a houseboat, why wouldn't it work for an oceangoing vessel?
So I looked into that some more, and found it very interesting indeed, there's an entire subculture, admittedly mostly of retired people, that live onboard their sailing yachts, travelling the world mostly at leisure. They had all the facilities that I had imagined you would need for a life at sea, large capacity batteries, solar and wind generators, backup diesel capacity, watermakers, etc etc etc, and lived almost entirely self sufficiently, travelling where they wished, when they wished.
This sounded like a pretty ideal lifestyle to me, I'm actually currently in the process of saving up enough money to buy a suitable vessel for precisely this purpose, investigating further I found that catamarans provided a very good level of stability and comparitively low preparation time, as monohull vessels would tend to have a more severe angle of keel whilst under passage, catamarans were a better choice for a real working environment.
The only remaining hurdles are *absolute* global internet access, and raising enough money to buy the catamaran itself, I've tentatively decided on a Perry 57 catamaran, as I figure if I intend to spend the rest of my life on a vessel, I had best get something I'm not soon going to tire of.
I hope by the time I purchase the vessel broadband global satellite access may be a step closer to reality, if not it will likely be mostly hugging various coasts for doing actual real work rather than wandering the ocean blue at a moments notice and entirely on a whim, but even that is a hell of a lot more freedom than a five day a week desk job back on terra firma.
All I can say is, it sounds crazy, but it isn't. The only reason I can come up with that this deep seated belief that it really is insane remains with me is that we're conditioned from birth to believe that the infrastructure modern society and government provides us with in order to aid our survival is so complex that we could never hope to sever that link, because if a large amount of people really did do this, it would greatly reduce the current "democratic" and utilitarian justifications for the absolute power of modern government.
Don't take my word for it, though, if you're feeling restless, ill at ease, whatever, investigate it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results of your enquiries.
Good question. I think that the reason I went looking for God lies in the sense of dissatisfaction with the possibility of this being it. If there is no God then we have no free will, there is no absolute morality, love is just a chemical inbalance and evil people will face no judgement. The universe is a cruel and unfeeling place governed by a random set of laws and chaos theory, where we are no more important than grains of interstellar dust. Finally, there is no life after death and our lives are meaningless, and so are everyone elses. When people die, it's not just them moving on, it's that their personality simply ceases to be and there is nothing left. If there is no God, then what is stopping us from fullfilling our darkest desires, and why should we consider the hopes and fears of anyone else. In my view, atheism can easily lead to sadism, or at least heavy hedonism. When I think of things like that I get a sense of what it must be like to be in the Total Perspective Vortex, and yes I do find that almost unbearable.
To say that there needs to be god in order for there to be free will, I do not understand, how can you then equate all the conditions of your supposed existence to reality as it stands if people don't have free will? I don't understand what god has to do with free will, at all.
Your arguments for the justice of god are convincing only if you consider christianity and religon in general to be the only basis of morality, this is demonstrably false, there are many atheists that are not immoral, the very fact that the majority of the most popular arguments *against* christianity are based around the idea that it constructs a universe that we're all placed in as a cruel sick joke for a petty universal traffic cops self esteem boosting technique.
Natural justice applies, independant of god's supposed law and rule, the evil reap what they sow in a large amount of cases bearing the wrath of those they seek to victimise, not because god wills it, but because humans have a self preservation and propagation instinct.
The universe cannot simultaneously be cruel and unfeeling, it is of course unfeeling as it is not a corporeal identity, this is not such a terrible thing, the laws of the universe are not random, they are linked to one another in quite specific ways, gravity effects momentum, heat effects energy, light effects perception, etc etc etc. Why do you need to be bestowed with more importance than interstellar dust by a god you freely admit cannot be proven to *even exist* beyond faith. Is it not your task to achieve your own significance, be satisfied with your own existence, and share that significance with those you love and care for, is *that* not the path to happiness?
Love need not be explained scientifically, or religiously, if it is just a chemical imbalance, and yet you choose to accept it, does that make it any less significant than if it were a gift from the IPU/god? I don't see why it should, in fact, I would argue that it makes it more significant, if it's hard reality rather than based on accepted myth that must be approached through blind faith or not at all.
When people die, if they die, do you suppose any of this truly matters to them when they're actually dead? If they cease to exist in entirety, which is of course up for debate, they would have no opinion one way or another. If you accept that when people die, they are dead, and that is all, what better motivation could you possibly have than to make the very best you possibly could out of this life you currently live in? Rather than skulking around miserly accepting the terrible state which you've been browbeaten as accepting as an anathema by the admission of original sin and other associated church trappings in guilt, in hope of escaping the more heinous fate of hell by surrendering your rational thought to the blind faith of the ages, as much as attaining the supposed bliss of heaven by doing likewise.
That which stops us from fulfilling our darkest desires, assuming that we
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Did you read the actual pdf report from the government on this?
1) lots of name dropping, lots of this senator is pushing to get this stuff looked at.
2) it was initially requested iirc in June to be completed no later than October and then pushed back to November (ie we don't really care about this and are dragging our feet)
3) it is liberally interspersed with pop culture references and song lyrics (I shit you not) to keep the attention of the readers (idiot australian politicians) and to impress upon them the important of space, technology and science in general.
These three points alone are enough to summarise the situation quite well, but the basic takeaway point for this entire debacle is that Australia is a shithole.
I live here, I know this.
We waste tons of money on shit like the australian institute of sport, provide inordinate amounts of media attention to useless shit, and basically ignore our entire sci/tech sector, about a year ago I heard one snippet from a US media source on a tech created in an australian labratory to drastically increase the production of energy producing refined uranium using lasers instead of the current contemporary gas centrifuge technology. I have hardly heard about it at all since, maybe five or six times, and never once has it even been mentioned in australian media.
This country exists to churn out petty bullshit about sport and celebrity and feel good about our half assed left wing touchy feely hug the environment protect the children ain't life in australia grand bullshit, expatriate me as soon as possible to Switzerland or someplace sensible.
Oh, I forgot, no such place exists.
This continuously confuses me. So you've created a system to achieve a particular goal, let's say you made yourself a router out of an old 386 box back in 1995 and whacked two ethernet cards and a 56k modem in the system to serve as a rudimentary firewall for research purposes. As time goes by, do you continue to maintain your esoteric and outdated bygone relic of prior eras, because that's the way that it's always been done? The obvious answer is that no, you replace it with some other technology better suited to meeting the goal of the original system, either a virtual system on a higher powered computer that you can sandbox with or a cheap wrt54g router attached to a dsl2 line for internet access, or probably both if you're anything like me. We're engineers, hackers, technical masters, call us what you will, but we have a particular philosophy that always seemed to be fundamentally disconnected to that of the everyday sheeple that make up the vast majority of the human population, engaging in meaningless ritual to placate some imagined deity and achieve a circumspect goal related only vaguely to the actual action in question as almost the sole defining factor of their lives. Why here though, are we just the same? Our bodies are just machines, like the tools and creations we tinker and modify without care as to ritual, and yet we insist on behaving just like the plebs when it comes to this facet of our lives, going through the ritual of diet and exercise to achieve the goal of health. Yes it works, rebooting the computer often works too, or turning an option off in the bios, or tweaking a setting to skip an iteration of a loop resulting in a segfault, but all of these things are simply ritual rather than engineering, and I'd assume of all audiences, this would be keenly aware of that fact and pursue alternative avenues? Where is the genetic engineering? Basal metabolic rate restructuring, genuine "I don't want to waste time on bullshit like jumping up and down when I could be writing code, but I don't want to die of a heart attack before I can accomplish what I'm aiming for either" type entries? Who has retrofitted a virus with genetic mods to delay insulin release or some weird stuff like that?
what specifically do you regard as "strong" evidence for the supernatural claims which your religion is based upon? I'd like to say something specifically that I have in mind but the simple fact is the bible is just rife with things which defy common sense, at which point do you claim these become historical and on what evidence do you base this view?
So am I to take it from this statement that with regards to that long, hard, thinking session I asked you to undertake approximately two years ago, you've abandoned fideism and now are back to claiming historicity for the origins of your faith?
Disappointing.
Or something you might want to consider, also, is that you're trying to explain the evolution of an organ that does not actually exist.
Read the article closely, it actually talks about specific areas of the brain that are primarily used for other purposes displaying unusual activity when the reported "religious experiences" are taking place, such as the sense of oneness with the universe being felt when they deactivate their spatial awareness functionality.
In this sense, the only organ involved is the brain, and the only function being exercised is the impairment of another function, which is not in itself an actual altogether seperate function.
The religious seem to be conveniently ignoring this fact and trying to spin the report as "god's phone to your brain". By trying to explain the evolution of the "phone" mechanism, you're kind of playing into their hands.
I get it, you're working on something and you're trying to concentrate, come up with the next block of code for an intricate function, and some popup email notification for shonky viagra salesman comes up and throws your concentration a little, annoying.
I don't however think that the best solution is to "unplug" so to speak, because I've had the reverse to, deeply entranced in something complex for hours on end, only to find out that it was useless work because I was emailed twenty minutes into the task and notified we'd be taking a different task, that is similiarily annoying.
It'd be ideal if you could set the computer to know what you're working on, say a project tag for incoming communication attempts, and anything related to what you were working on got through instantly with the potential for interruption otherwise it was stowed away without notification until later. I achieve this now just by making assumptions about who will be contacting me with regards to what, but it's a kludge, and the people you expect to not bug you with something unless it's important aren't always worthy of such faith.
A way to let people know that need to know what you're working on without interrupting you, and giving them the potential to interrupt you if they really ought to anyway, that'd be nice. Unplugging is just taking a step back, and there was a good reason we got to where we are to begin with.
OK, I'm a little girl without enough time
l der-talk.txt
You're a clueless asshole with too much.
Read this if you really want to know, otherwise just keep your head firmly inserted in your ass;
http://www.seastead.org/talk/ucboulder2005/UC-Bou
I don't care that you disagree with me, that's fine, I'm simply pointing out it's a waste of my time to bother engaging you in civilised discussion when you drop lines like this in the heat of your tantrums;
You'd think someone were trying to take your candy. Quit whining like a little girl.
I still have no intention of continuing the discussion with you, I just wanted to make it perfectly clear precisely why I view you an ill mannered buffoon not worth the consideration necessary to continue a serious discussion with you, just in case you want to avoid being classified as such again, I advise you to read this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
You come close to a compelling argument, you show why public healthcare is a good, obviously, but you fail to draw a line to justifying it's finance by extorted money.
To put it another way, say I'm a self involved human with nothing beyond my rational self interest and desire to make as much money as possible, not to the point that you're doing things of questionable morality, but that you're providing goods or services at the highest price the market will bear and your competitors will allow. Where's my motivation to enter medicine / biotech and add to the forward momentum of the field? Make new discoveries, become a competitive entity amongst other competitive entities and drive prices down and quality up?
Living in a welfare state, by definition, removes that incentive, any money or portion thereof that you earn from anything may well be simply taken away at the convenience of the state, if all I give a damn about is myself, why even work at all? Why not choose the path of least resistance? Taxation and government makes that path a reprehensible one in my view, gaming the welfare system in order to pay for your livelihood and doing nothing more, forever. Why put in any effort if the proceeds thereof will be continuously plundered, and the harder you paddle the faster the current gets? What rational objective reason?
We live in a world ruled and dominated by thieves, why provide them with anything to thieve from you? What other reason than wishy washy hug the children mantra can you honestly provide?
It comes down to this, at the end of the day, if a robber attempts to rob me in the streets at gun or knifepoint, I will, if I choose to pay him, pay him *only* because of his knife or gun, I don't give a fuck if he's robbing me for his next heroin fix or if he's robbing me to donate to UNICEF, he is a thief, if given half the opportunity I'd gladly kill him in order to remove him from my path far more readily than pay him. The same applies to the government and taxation, the only reason I pay is because I fear their guns, I don't care what moral justification they seek to venture in order to backup their blatant theft, it doesn't change the act from what it is.
I'm not going to bother considering continuing a serious discussion with someone as ill mannered as you have demonstrated you are, suffice to say getting upset and cursing at people when you're wrong is no more effective than seperating your vaunted government departments and then allaying blame away from certain sectors thereof onto other sectors of the same whole and thus claiming the whole is somehow guiltless.
All I can say is if most Americans are like you, I suppose you deserve what you get with regards to your approval of your military and foreign policies.
Good day.
I think the parameters of the outlined organisation should be limited by voluntary contract, and paid for in kind.
As for moving anywhere else, I've considered it, I live in Australia, not America, and we're even more fond of tax than you guys, but the simple fact is this, perhaps the best nations in the world in terms of small, efficient government with low to no tax are not places where I've lived my life so far, I have not spent eleven years already working there, investing in a social network, etc etc etc, I have not spent eleven years forcibly being robbed of my income by those governments and thus have not come to either expect anything from them or resent them for the damage they've already done and wish to take it out of their hide in kind.
That being said, it's also incredibly impractical to simply move governments everytime you disagree with a policy, even the best of nations are far from perfect, such as switzerland, andorra, lichtenstein or vanuatu. A better long term solution is probably something like http://www.seastead.org/ I'm currently just taking a wait and see approach, but I assure you as soon as a viable alternative to modern slavery becomes available, I'll be there.
Your examples of features from which everyone is benefitting are mostly addressed here;
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=149177&cid=125 15118
The same applies to all the others as well, in fact I can think of little in the way of a service, beyond *maybe* a military, that could not be better provided through a private user pays and voluntary participation scheme, without the possibility of the accusation of theft being levelled at it.
If you didn't pay for this through taxes you'd be paying private industry. Inefficient as government is, you only have to look at US healthcare to see that private industry can be even worse.
I disagree;
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/hea_hea_car_fu n_pub_per_cap
Your country is only third in line when it comes to public spending on healthcare, furthermore what right do you have to a doctor's time or a drug companies medicine? A popular appeal for modern politicians for the essential nature of public health is precisely because people fear death and they want as long a life as possible, this doesn't necessarily make it anyone else's responsibility to help you achieve that goal.
Would medicine as a field advance so rapidly if it were mandated that no profit could ever be made from it? Where do most of the advances in modern medicine originate? That's right, the US pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, companies that work for profit, the same organisations that you're currently so dismissive of as in need of reform.
They don't owe you or me anything, and attempts at the legislative level to try and force them to comply with this perceived duty of care are just as likely to hobble innovation and motivation in their fields as allow access to high quality healthcare for every last person that believes it to be their divine right.
It's an online handle. I'm no more communist than you are ethereal.
Well I'm glad to hear you don't identify as communist, but I think we can fairly safely say that you are in fact quite a lot more communist than me, about (insert effective tax rate here) percent more communist. ;)
Partially, yes, directly proportional to the degree to which you are taxed, in fact;
Slavery can mean one or more related conditions which involve control of a person against his or her will, enforced by violence or other forms of coercion.
Source; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
Do you dispute that for the portion of your income which goes to tax you are in fact being forced to work under the threat of direct violence?
Try not paying your taxes, when they come to take you away, resist.
I rest my case.
A typical defense, but lets examine it more closely;
* A stable government.
I don't know directly to what you refer to here, but I'd point out that the government has the potential to change every four years, perhaps you mean they won't be too tyrannical to their subjects, but with the blatant disregard for the constitution illustrated with such modern law as the PATRIOT act and the DMCA, I question the validity of that point. Perhaps you mean that they're stable in the sense that they won't indulge in foreign expansionism and nation building, playing world cop, sticking their nose in where it's not wanted...
Oops, no, not that either.
Would this apply equally to a mafioso crime family ruling a city? Well, yes, up to the extent that others fight with them for control of the territory of the city, much as the current war between the terrorists and the government rages with plenty of innocent life lost on both the side of the US and it's perceived enemy nation states.
Can you draw me one example of how this point is in fact anything more than mafioso lite, sugarcoated and cleverly marketted? Keep in mind that Burma, Cuba, China, until very recently Iraq, and Syria have also had a "stable government" before pushing this any further.
* a modern highway system
Seems that the questionable worth and fairly indisputable bloat of the Interstate highway system is a poor defense to the degree to which you are taxed, what of those of us who have no need for such a road? Is it still acceptable that we be forced at the point of a gun to pay for it? Further note the figure of 72% of funding for the highway taken from direct "user-pays" types of tax on fuel and associated items, it doesn't go far to validating the wholesale plunder of the general population to the level of the modern tax system when 72% of the infrastructure in question here is in fact funded directly by the users thereof.
Furthermore, keep in mind that government projects are notoriously inefficient compared to their private counterparts, consider the amount of funding spent on the system in it's current incarnation compared to what could have been achieved in a completely voluntary commercial project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_highway#Fi nancing
* a large military to protect our interests
If you didn't have such a large military sprawled out all over the world with it's fingers in the various pies of other nation states globally, oftentimes seen as meddling, sometimes leading to direct hostile action on your home country civilians, it'd be questionable how worthwhile this asset is from a standpoint of attempting to minimise invasion of your country, take note;
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us/Military
Massive expenditure, and yet;
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/mil_exp_dol_fi g_cap
Of the countries in the lower half of global military expenditure, how many have been unsuccessful in defending their own borders? (Hint: they all still exist).
Yes, you have a really big sword, no, it's not doing you any good, in fact, more often than not, you are hitting yourself with it.
* jails to keep criminals from your belongings and family
I can't believe you're honestly positing your prison system as an asset worth paying for, do you really want to go down this path? I'll give you an option to reconsider, keeping in mind the following;
http://www.nationmaster.com
The problem is something is basically that tax cuts tend to disproportionately favour the rich, and by rich I'm not talking $50K or $100K. But $1M+. Or even $10M+. Of the $X amount of money the government lost in tax revenue, something like 1/3X or 1/2X came from the top couple percent of people, the ubber-wealthy.
Sorry, but I remain unconvinced by these figures, that still means that if the cut in was at something much lower, say around the 100k mark, the largest percentage of lost tax revenue would by necessity come from those far higher up than 100k due to the fact that they're putting so much in. I really wanted to know the exact nature of the tax cuts, where were the margins moved, what was changed?
What would be beneficial is a more balanced form of progressive taxation that doesn't put the highest tax bracket at a low sum of $50K or $70K. Because someone earning $50K shouldn't be taxed the same as someone at $50M. Perhaps something like 40% at $100K, 50% at $1M, then 0.5% per $1M more.
40% of your earnings on a 100k salary? so to put this another way 40% of your time wasted in slave labour to a central government authority you do not exercise direct control over? Serious question, how can you possibly promote such blatant theft?
People always say that taxing the super-rich will discourage people. Which is bullshit. I recall reading that in the US in 40s/50s/60s, the highest effective tax-rate was around 95%. Did that deter people or hinder the economy? Hell no, it was probably the greatest period of growth in US history.
I care less that it would discourage people than the fact that it's just plain wrong, taxation is theft, *especially* to the degree to which it is prevalent in modern life. As far as the economic period you mention there, I question both the validity of the 95% figure as well as point out that any increase in production or economy could easily be attributed to wartime more than high taxes.
Then again, you are a communist, I assume, and all of this is fairly par for the course for your ilk, yes?
How exactly did Bush's tax cuts work to only benefit the top 1%? A little background here, I'm actually from Australia myself, here we have tax coming out our ears, our income tax is disgraceful, 48.5% cutting in at around 70k$ AUD (which is about 50k$ USD). On top of that corporations pay a flat tax of 30%, there's a 10% GST on just about everything, and there is barely a large purchase / transfer you can make without having to pay a large stamp duty or government regulated fee in some way shape or form.
So here, when someone typically talks of a "tax cut for the rich" it's cutting out that 48.5% top of the line income tax bracket, which would suit me just fine, I'm of the opinion that when it comes down to it between all the taxes on Australians there must truly be a very small amount of real actual money that isn't seized by the government on transfer.
How does it work in the US? With the tax cuts that so many seem to complain about for the rich, did he honestly just rig it to only touch that top 1% of all taxpayers? Educate me, if you please, I'd be intrigued to hear.
And so your solution is dealing with them via laws and regulations, the very stick they weild so successfully against everyone else? Isn't this akin to trying to drown a fish in water?
How about we all just put the stick away?
I'm not disputing the fact that a lot of people have a lot of money they never lifted a finger to earn, I'm simply pointing out that there are plenty of people, myself included, who worked our way up from absolutely nothing and don't take kindly to being pilfered of our earnings by a bloated and corrupt bureaucracy.
Not to rain on your parade or anything here but would these statements be true also;
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to meet the military expenditure budget is extremely bad policy.
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to fund social security is extremely bad policy.
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit in order to fund (pork barrel public project of choice) is extremely bad policy.
Also, would your original statement if rephrased like this;
Deficit spending is bad. It should only be done in EXTREME emergencies. Going into a deficit just because we don't feel like plundering our more productive citizens hand over fist anymore is extremely bad policy.
Still be acceptable?
Or let's say that they don't, and you're talking about the meanest form of modern corporate exploitation possible, for argument's sake lets say Nike hiring south east asian sweatshops for garment manufacturing, surely this is a heinous crime which can be unequivocally written off as the purest example of concentrated evil, right?
But what about;
According to a UNICEF study an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the U.S. banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterence Act was introduced in the US as estimated 50,000 children were dimissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," --"all of them more hazardous and exploitatitive than garment production" according to the UNICEF study. [1]
This?
A lot of people seem to be viewing the american job drain from a vacuum, I too am a coder and a sysadmin and I admit in my more primitive moments the same sense of panic and dismay strikes me when I ponder how I can compete with someone willing to do the same work as I am for 40$ per day, but the thing is you're not taking into account the entire equation.
A bunch of jobs go to india, there's less money in the domestic economy to spend on necessities of life, even if this is limited to a degree by government economic controls or other inefficient controls on natural reality, it can still be said to be a significant drain, so what's the result of the drop in demand for higher priced housing and goods? Those prices drop, also, they simply *have* to, if noone is buying them then it makes no sense for the businesses involved to maintain an unrealistic pricing structure and not actually get paid for their goods / services. The end result is a slow equilibrium being imposed upon the entire globalised economy, prices drop in the overpriced areas to match the decreased demand and raise in the underpriced areas to deal with the increased demand.
So what am I getting at? If you want someone to shout at, shout at the people making your life such a ridiculously high cost, your goods and service providers and the government that sucks the lifeblood from both you and them.
What about changing your mind? Isn't it a little stubborn to stick to your originally stated position regardless of coming to think of things in a different light?
Isn't that half the problem with the world today?
Happens in almost all areas in the entire world.
It's called government, god love them.
Sure;
r ea d&forum=1&topic=449
e x. cfm?show=all&type=1&tfr=fp
http://www.ssca.org/sscabb/index.php?action=vth
SSCA is seven seas cruising association, that's a direct link to my initial proposal on the site, but the main forums are good for pretty much any subject you care to think of.
http://www.sailnet.net/collections/articles/ind
Sailnet has a lot of interesting articles with relation to pretty much any subject you could imagine, and last but not least
http://www.seastead.org
Which is not directly related to sailboat cruising, but holds *reams* of data for the technically minded with regards to what to expect from a life at sea.
You purchase it, via an ancient method known as trade, unless you're positing that you need rely on any specific political or social structure in order to have a good produced in order that it may be procured by trade, by that logic, ancient civilisation was entirely reliant on chinese imperial culture for the consumption of silk? Please acquire a clue, this is not a fact, It doesn't require that there be the precise infrastructure that currently exists in order to provide any of the necessary things for onboard living.
I've already rented a boat with friends for a few weeks and none of it was enormously complicated, in fact that degree to which it was automated and an extension of computerised navigation systems was intriguing to me, I am well aware of the fact that such systems cannot be entirely relied upon 100% of the time, but I am also well aware of the fact that they serve a genuine purpose, otherwise, they would not exist at all.
Furthermore, fuel is a very sparsely used commodity on a sailing yacht, as motive power is provided by the wind and the majority of shipboard power provided by renewable means such as solar and wind based energy generation, so even if it were entirely true that you needed to rely on the infrastructure of general civilisation in order to procure any of these goods, sign some contract in the belief of the moral validity of modern government and society in order to have the right to partake in any form of trade and tithe your earnings in kind, this would *still* be to a very small degree.
If my vessel caught fire and sank in the middle of the pacific ocean, I wouldn't expect anyone to come and save me, I would expect to die, I am not afflicted with the sense of entitlement you seem to attribute to me purely by my nature as a human being, I realise that's rare and likely not the case for yourself, from the way you've come across, but I assure you there are others just like me.
I've wanted to do something similiar on a small scale for a *long* time now, I run my own consultancy and do most of my work for clients remotely, there's no real reason I need to be land based to do any of that stuff, so I started looking into maybe buying a houseboat on a local river, with the advent of wireless internet it was entirely practical to do so, and I thought that I could travel up and down the river and drop anchor closer to clients and thus have a shorter commute in the event that I ever did need to make onsite visits. That turned out to be a fairly feasible idea with no obvious gotchas, you run diesel generators for excess power requirements with a large battery pack hooked up to solar and wind generators, and you're fairly self sufficient when it comes to low end energy requirements.
This is from a twenty five year old guy that had lived all his life on land, and I have to say I consider myself a fairly practical person, so something about the entire idea just kept hitting me the wrong way, it had that "no, this is pie in the sky, it can't happen" feeling to it, and I just couldn't figure out why. I went into dramatic levels of detail in speccing out the lifestyle, you can purchase water generators which will create freshwater from seawater using nothing but energy (provided from the aforementioned power infrastructure) and there's plenty of storage room in a houseboat for food, which is pretty much the only thing you cannot harvest directly from your immediate environment.
That last statement triggered my attention and I thought, well, what about the ocean? What does it really take to make ocean passages on the high seas? or even just clinging to the eastern coast of Australia? If all the provisioning you've done so far works for a houseboat, why wouldn't it work for an oceangoing vessel?
So I looked into that some more, and found it very interesting indeed, there's an entire subculture, admittedly mostly of retired people, that live onboard their sailing yachts, travelling the world mostly at leisure. They had all the facilities that I had imagined you would need for a life at sea, large capacity batteries, solar and wind generators, backup diesel capacity, watermakers, etc etc etc, and lived almost entirely self sufficiently, travelling where they wished, when they wished.
This sounded like a pretty ideal lifestyle to me, I'm actually currently in the process of saving up enough money to buy a suitable vessel for precisely this purpose, investigating further I found that catamarans provided a very good level of stability and comparitively low preparation time, as monohull vessels would tend to have a more severe angle of keel whilst under passage, catamarans were a better choice for a real working environment.
The only remaining hurdles are *absolute* global internet access, and raising enough money to buy the catamaran itself, I've tentatively decided on a Perry 57 catamaran, as I figure if I intend to spend the rest of my life on a vessel, I had best get something I'm not soon going to tire of.
I hope by the time I purchase the vessel broadband global satellite access may be a step closer to reality, if not it will likely be mostly hugging various coasts for doing actual real work rather than wandering the ocean blue at a moments notice and entirely on a whim, but even that is a hell of a lot more freedom than a five day a week desk job back on terra firma.
All I can say is, it sounds crazy, but it isn't. The only reason I can come up with that this deep seated belief that it really is insane remains with me is that we're conditioned from birth to believe that the infrastructure modern society and government provides us with in order to aid our survival is so complex that we could never hope to sever that link, because if a large amount of people really did do this, it would greatly reduce the current "democratic" and utilitarian justifications for the absolute power of modern government.
Don't take my word for it, though, if you're feeling restless, ill at ease, whatever, investigate it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results of your enquiries.
To say that there needs to be god in order for there to be free will, I do not understand, how can you then equate all the conditions of your supposed existence to reality as it stands if people don't have free will? I don't understand what god has to do with free will, at all.
Your arguments for the justice of god are convincing only if you consider christianity and religon in general to be the only basis of morality, this is demonstrably false, there are many atheists that are not immoral, the very fact that the majority of the most popular arguments *against* christianity are based around the idea that it constructs a universe that we're all placed in as a cruel sick joke for a petty universal traffic cops self esteem boosting technique.
Natural justice applies, independant of god's supposed law and rule, the evil reap what they sow in a large amount of cases bearing the wrath of those they seek to victimise, not because god wills it, but because humans have a self preservation and propagation instinct.
The universe cannot simultaneously be cruel and unfeeling, it is of course unfeeling as it is not a corporeal identity, this is not such a terrible thing, the laws of the universe are not random, they are linked to one another in quite specific ways, gravity effects momentum, heat effects energy, light effects perception, etc etc etc. Why do you need to be bestowed with more importance than interstellar dust by a god you freely admit cannot be proven to *even exist* beyond faith. Is it not your task to achieve your own significance, be satisfied with your own existence, and share that significance with those you love and care for, is *that* not the path to happiness?
Love need not be explained scientifically, or religiously, if it is just a chemical imbalance, and yet you choose to accept it, does that make it any less significant than if it were a gift from the IPU/god? I don't see why it should, in fact, I would argue that it makes it more significant, if it's hard reality rather than based on accepted myth that must be approached through blind faith or not at all.
When people die, if they die, do you suppose any of this truly matters to them when they're actually dead? If they cease to exist in entirety, which is of course up for debate, they would have no opinion one way or another. If you accept that when people die, they are dead, and that is all, what better motivation could you possibly have than to make the very best you possibly could out of this life you currently live in? Rather than skulking around miserly accepting the terrible state which you've been browbeaten as accepting as an anathema by the admission of original sin and other associated church trappings in guilt, in hope of escaping the more heinous fate of hell by surrendering your rational thought to the blind faith of the ages, as much as attaining the supposed bliss of heaven by doing likewise.
That which stops us from fulfilling our darkest desires, assuming that we