As an aetheist, I'm not offended by the absurdities of your religious dogmas. What do I care what your imaginary friend thinks of me. Tonight you may pray that all infidels burn in your imaginary hell - makes no difference. Some day you will die and then guess what, nothing will happen. You have no soul, I'm sorry to inform you. I'm sorry that that is just more than you can bare. So by all means believe in Christ or the Easter Bunny or whatever, if it makes accepting mortality easier for you. Just don't force that bullshit down the throats of others; some of us haven't the stomache for it.
Anyway, what of this evidence. You must be referring to your Bible. Do you have any idea how rediculous you sound offering the Bible as evidence for anything. I should offer you the story of Hansel and Grettel as proof that witches live in candy houses. It would make as much sense. My friend, wake up, you live in a fairy tale. Do you not see what passes for logic and reason to you.
Given that Fundementalists, such as yourself, are in the extreme minority of christians world-wide. Perhaps, it would be more sensible to find another name for your religion. Really, why bother renaming the religion of over 2 billion people on the whims a 100 million. Face it, you are a radical at odds with the majority of the people of your own faith. If you want to divorce yourself from the majority, then pick a new name for yourself. I suggest the name, Jews for Christ, that way you can stick to the doctrine of the Old Testament and still have Christ as your Messiah.
Your assumption is that we "NEED" to consume. We don't. True a lot of our economy is based on consumption but then consuption is a desease as well
What are you... oh right you mean tuberculosis.
Seriously though, I absolutely assume that consumption is a necessity. That is to say, the consumption of food. You managed to say a lot of things with which few informed people would disagree. But you completely skirted around the only issue I actually brought up.
We will soon be running out of oil and natural gas. So then we will have to start burning our vast coal reserves. But wait, per unit of energy, coal produces more radioactive material than a nuclear reactor. So I guess we will have to count out coal.
Uh oh, that means we will never be able to sustain our energy intensive green revolution. Well no problem we can just let half the world starve to death... sucks to be brown.
Well, I'm not going to defend the ion swarm method as the most efficient; I lack the information to hold an informed opinion on the subject. However You could put millions of ion engines on the same surface and not stress the rock - we are talking about tiny amounts of force. Incidentally, you need aproximately 100k engines because you cannot put them all on the same face; the rock is spinning after all; so to maintain a force vector you need to cover the surface. You need the simultaneous force of only 10-15k of them. I don't see how you can avoid some form of swarm.
One giant engine would have to be assembled in space. Heck, even 10 giant engines would have to be assembled in space. Why put all your eggs in a few baskets. Massive redundancy would be the way to go. That way if some fail or misfire over 20 year life time, we still live.
Also, gravity will take care of attachment. All you have to do is provide the ion gnats with the ability to land at random locations on the surface and the ability to right themselves. Designated locations would be of marginal utility so why bother.
Even if the rock isn't going to hit us, I think it might be a good idea to swarm it with ions drives. They would give you very fine control (if very slow) of the rocks orbit. The value of 50 gigatonnes of material parked in L4 or L5 cannot be overstated, even if it took a century or two to get it there.
As you pointed out yourself, the law of conservation of momentum is going to have a lot to say about a constant 1/1000 lb of thrust against that much mass.
I started a similar criticism based on running the actual numbers. I was suprised to find out that it is feasible to move the rock by the radius of the Earth using ion engines. Off the shelf engines will give you.2 Newtons today with 4,500 Watts of solar array. You would need about 100,000 of them to practially move the rock. But they are light weight and so is the propellant (even 20 years worth.) The whole swarm would weigh only 1000-10000 tonnes. Nothing a few hundred to few thousand rocket launches could get up there. Expensive as hell, but doable.
You should know then that Aspbergers is quite common in this industry.
There may be a higher incidence of Aspbergers in the industry. However, no one ever mentions the f**king epidemic of WIHAS (Wish I had Asbergers Syndrome) in the industry. Sadly there is no known cure for either at this time.
Social Security has existed for 70 years. One could make a fine statistical argument that the odds are in favor of it still existing in another 30 years.
Regardless, Social Security is not and has never been a retirement program. Therefore if you are under 35, or any age for that matter, you should plan responsibly for retirement without relying on SS. SS is a social safety net and 2/3 of the people on it are dependents and invalids. It has nothing to do with reitrement at all. Which renders your entire argument moot.
You are also highly misinformed. Please stop spouting ignorant crap as if you are knowledgeable on the subject. If you had read the article you would never have written such tripe.
- Politicians don't know how to reduce spending.
That ignores the reduction in spending (as measured by relative GDP) that occurred in the last half of the 90's. But generally speaking you are right.
- Politicians have been spending the SS income rather than investing it for years now.
A policy created under Reagen in an effort to hide the enourmous deficit created by his initial tax cuts. Eventually Reagen acted responsibly and reaised taxes but the precident of spending social security surplus was never reversed.
- There are going to be more people collecting from SS when the baby boomers retire than there will be contributing to it.
Patently absurd. You must mean something else entirley. There will be three times as many people contributing as collecting during the worst of the baby boom retirement.
- Politicians bought votes in years past by adjusting the cost of living based on wage inflation, versus the previous (more reasonable) way of calculating it based on regular inflation.
My understanding is different. From what I gather Carter switched to wage based inflation during a period of high real inflation but lower wage inflation in the late 70's. So it was actually a politician acting responsibly. It is just that noone during the next 24 years has bothered to switch it back once real fell below wage. Oh wait that's right, there has been almost no difference between the two over the last 24 years nor is there going to be any difference between them over the next 75 years.
The wage vs. real inflation is just a red herring argument put out there by the right. Ignore it.
It's a broken system.
No, its not broken. You are just misinformed. Go back and read the article.
It sounds like you do not know enough about this subject to even have an opinion.
85,000 vs 25,000,000 spread over two years works out to 1.7 deaths per 1000 people. The pre war death rate was 5.66 deaths per 1000. That amounts to a 30% increase in death rates. For comparison the US rate is 8.34 deaths per 1000. So by 'bringing democracy' to Iraq we have managed to increase their death rate upwards towards our own. Just goes to show how brutal life was under Sadaam.
Burying your head in the sand will not make it go away.
Apparently you don't believe in carefully reading peoples posts, either. Neither he nor anyone else on this thread offered a 150,000 figure.
To answer the question which you were trying to ask, yes, the study was peer-reviewed. The authors were of Johns Hopkins, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They randomly surveyed households covering 7800 individuals. Since they are using sampling methodologies there are two sources of error: sampling and model. The relative sampling error would be in the low single digit range. The modeling error is nearly impossible to determine, but it would be unusual for it to be off by more than 10%. So figure 15% total to be sure. That leaves you with 95% certainty that there were more than 85,000 Iraqi civilian casualties.
When does this state of excess cognitive dissonance occur? The one that causes a willingness to re-examine the facts.
If history is any lesson, then this re-examination may be far into the future. I believe that as individuals, in isolation, re-examination can occur; but it will not happen until death for a mass of people unless forced from without (see, Germany.) Hence, short of being conquered, I firmly believe that no matter what course this administration stears us through half of America will believe it was the right path until the day they die.
First off, the definite article is necessary for a virus. Else we would be talking about virus. Which I think we all can agree is wrong. Virusses are another matter entirely.
Perhaps you are confused by the fact that HIV is a proper collective noun. Consider another proper collective noun - the Good Old Party. We can talk about the GOP. Or about Good Old parties. But we cannot talk about GOP. We cannot talk about Republican Party, either. So by the ggparent's peave, we should not be able to talk about HIV.
Regardless, talking about HIV is quite acceptable and normal to normal people.
'On' has a pretty specific meaning. In think you meant 'in.' Regardless, why would you make such a point to begin with. I doubt seriously the well informed g-g-grand parent poster wasn't aware of what you posted. Hence you were just splitting hairs in order to either score some sort of bizarre rhetorical point or support the rediculous notion that nuclear plants are less safe than coal.
Well said.
And a pet peeve of mine is moderators who mod uninformative droll as informative just because the author sounds like an authority. Another pet peeve is that subsequent moderators don't lower the moderation even when it becomes obvious that the poster is in fact ignorant.
I know about the rest. But even if I didn't, it would be obvious that the grandparent' remarks don't address the great grandparent's assertions. The grandparent shoud take a course in logic and rhetoric.
Even if what you say is true it is irrelevent to the grandparents post. IBM will keep the profit and therefore by buying IBM you are investing in pioneering work.
The three billin figure is a bit of a puzzle since it doesn't jibe at all with the actual amount our goverment spend ont he UN in 2003 or 2002. My guess is that the discrpency is entirely due to the in-kind spending fine print. I know that the Food programs had 1.5 billion in in-kind spending for 2003, so that is much of the difference right there. There other couple hundred difference is probablywith some other program. I'll have to look up the nature of the in-kind giving. The tax payers may be paying for these in tax deductions if they are coming from Corporatinos. I imagine the story on it is involves paying agro-interest off on some level by the tax payers. Regardless, are you saying you are against 1.5 billion in in-kind food donations to starving people. It's not like UN employees are eating all of that.
Here's a suggestion. Stop opening your mouth. The less you say the smarter you look.
You asked, "should they pay rent?"
You do realize they own the fucking building, don't you? Perhaps you were refering to real estate taxes. But if you were, then you still don't know wtf you are talking about, because the land isn't part of the US it is international territory.
I'm guessing that you are just repeating from memory some lame rant from pick-you-favorite-reactionary-celebrity-oxycontin- dopehead. In which case, this is just about some embassies owing NYC property taxes. Well I have news for you, embassies are not part of the UN. They are part of various foreign nations. So take your beef up with those nations, not with the UN.
RE 3 billion dollars a year. You ignorant slut. Here's a good breakdown of the '03 payments: http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FO20020 227316 Basically our annual dues are ~300 million. We pay more to fund peacekeeping operations across the globe. Those are all operations which we chose to be involved in, you might recall we have veto power over such things. And the grand total isn't even in the ball park of 3 billion a year.
RE: Massacres - Where in the UN charter do you see a mandate to be the world's policeman. It simply isn't what the UN was formed to do. Its a straw man argument. Anyway, it has taken on a lot of peacekeeping roles, including roles in all of the places you mentioned, which pretty much makes you look ignorant again - a running theme.
Re: 21 billion dollar scandal - The report comes out in January let's wait and see. That's what my Senator, Hillary, said. Although, it ain't looking good for Kojo. Anyway, I'm not up on the scandal, maybe you can fill me in on the details, but I bet the more details you get the less it will have to do with average New Yorkers and what they ought to think of the UN being in their backyard. In otherwords, I bet it is off topic.
Re:While other countries pay little or nothing - That's like the rich bitchin about paying more in taxes than the poor. The funny thing about being a rich american is that we materially benefit more from a stable world than does some poor bastard in the third world. The key to this is 'material' as in wealth. Our wealth requires stability and so we pay to keep it. That's reality, get over it.
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As an aetheist, I'm not offended by the absurdities of your religious dogmas. What do I care what your imaginary friend thinks of me. Tonight you may pray that all infidels burn in your imaginary hell - makes no difference. Some day you will die and then guess what, nothing will happen. You have no soul, I'm sorry to inform you. I'm sorry that that is just more than you can bare. So by all means believe in Christ or the Easter Bunny or whatever, if it makes accepting mortality easier for you. Just don't force that bullshit down the throats of others; some of us haven't the stomache for it.
Anyway, what of this evidence. You must be referring to your Bible. Do you have any idea how rediculous you sound offering the Bible as evidence for anything. I should offer you the story of Hansel and Grettel as proof that witches live in candy houses. It would make as much sense. My friend, wake up, you live in a fairy tale. Do you not see what passes for logic and reason to you.
Given that Fundementalists, such as yourself, are in the extreme minority of christians world-wide. Perhaps, it would be more sensible to find another name for your religion. Really, why bother renaming the religion of over 2 billion people on the whims a 100 million. Face it, you are a radical at odds with the majority of the people of your own faith. If you want to divorce yourself from the majority, then pick a new name for yourself. I suggest the name, Jews for Christ, that way you can stick to the doctrine of the Old Testament and still have Christ as your Messiah.
Your assumption is that we "NEED" to consume. We don't. True a lot of our economy is based on consumption but then consuption is a desease as well
What are you... oh right you mean tuberculosis.
Seriously though, I absolutely assume that consumption is a necessity. That is to say, the consumption of food. You managed to say a lot of things with which few informed people would disagree. But you completely skirted around the only issue I actually brought up.
Ok genius,
Tell me, if not nuclear then what?
We will soon be running out of oil and natural gas. So then we will have to start burning our vast coal reserves. But wait, per unit of energy, coal produces more radioactive material than a nuclear reactor. So I guess we will have to count out coal.
Uh oh, that means we will never be able to sustain our energy intensive green revolution. Well no problem we can just let half the world starve to death... sucks to be brown.
Great solution! Please try again.
Well, I'm not going to defend the ion swarm method as the most efficient; I lack the information to hold an informed opinion on the subject. However You could put millions of ion engines on the same surface and not stress the rock - we are talking about tiny amounts of force. Incidentally, you need aproximately 100k engines because you cannot put them all on the same face; the rock is spinning after all; so to maintain a force vector you need to cover the surface. You need the simultaneous force of only 10-15k of them. I don't see how you can avoid some form of swarm.
One giant engine would have to be assembled in space. Heck, even 10 giant engines would have to be assembled in space. Why put all your eggs in a few baskets. Massive redundancy would be the way to go. That way if some fail or misfire over 20 year life time, we still live.
Also, gravity will take care of attachment. All you have to do is provide the ion gnats with the ability to land at random locations on the surface and the ability to right themselves. Designated locations would be of marginal utility so why bother.
Even if the rock isn't going to hit us, I think it might be a good idea to swarm it with ions drives. They would give you very fine control (if very slow) of the rocks orbit. The value of 50 gigatonnes of material parked in L4 or L5 cannot be overstated, even if it took a century or two to get it there.
As you pointed out yourself, the law of conservation of momentum is going to have a lot to say about a constant 1/1000 lb of thrust against that much mass.
.2 Newtons today with 4,500 Watts of solar array. You would need about 100,000 of them to practially move the rock. But they are light weight and so is the propellant (even 20 years worth.) The whole swarm would weigh only 1000-10000 tonnes. Nothing a few hundred to few thousand rocket launches could get up there. Expensive as hell, but doable.
I started a similar criticism based on running the actual numbers. I was suprised to find out that it is feasible to move the rock by the radius of the Earth using ion engines. Off the shelf engines will give you
You should know then that Aspbergers is quite common in this industry.
There may be a higher incidence of Aspbergers in the industry. However, no one ever mentions the f**king epidemic of WIHAS (Wish I had Asbergers Syndrome) in the industry. Sadly there is no known cure for either at this time.
Socialsecurity.org is run by the CATO Institute. You have made the effort to be informed but you might try sources that are less biased.
Social Security has existed for 70 years. One could make a fine statistical argument that the odds are in favor of it still existing in another 30 years.
Regardless, Social Security is not and has never been a retirement program. Therefore if you are under 35, or any age for that matter, you should plan responsibly for retirement without relying on SS. SS is a social safety net and 2/3 of the people on it are dependents and invalids. It has nothing to do with reitrement at all. Which renders your entire argument moot.
I'm not right or left, I'm central.
You are also highly misinformed. Please stop spouting ignorant crap as if you are knowledgeable on the subject. If you had read the article you would never have written such tripe.
- Politicians don't know how to reduce spending.
That ignores the reduction in spending (as measured by relative GDP) that occurred in the last half of the 90's. But generally speaking you are right.
- Politicians have been spending the SS income rather than investing it for years now.
A policy created under Reagen in an effort to hide the enourmous deficit created by his initial tax cuts. Eventually Reagen acted responsibly and reaised taxes but the precident of spending social security surplus was never reversed.
- There are going to be more people collecting from SS when the baby boomers retire than there will be contributing to it.
Patently absurd. You must mean something else entirley. There will be three times as many people contributing as collecting during the worst of the baby boom retirement.
- Politicians bought votes in years past by adjusting the cost of living based on wage inflation, versus the previous (more reasonable) way of calculating it based on regular inflation.
My understanding is different. From what I gather Carter switched to wage based inflation during a period of high real inflation but lower wage inflation in the late 70's. So it was actually a politician acting responsibly. It is just that noone during the next 24 years has bothered to switch it back once real fell below wage. Oh wait that's right, there has been almost no difference between the two over the last 24 years nor is there going to be any difference between them over the next 75 years.
The wage vs. real inflation is just a red herring argument put out there by the right. Ignore it.
It's a broken system.
No, its not broken. You are just misinformed. Go back and read the article.
No doubt that is why NASA and ESA hire sophomore physics interns to do these calculations for them.
It sounds like you do not know enough about this subject to even have an opinion.
85,000 vs 25,000,000 spread over two years works out to 1.7 deaths per 1000 people. The pre war death rate was 5.66 deaths per 1000. That amounts to a 30% increase in death rates. For comparison the US rate is 8.34 deaths per 1000. So by 'bringing democracy' to Iraq we have managed to increase their death rate upwards towards our own. Just goes to show how brutal life was under Sadaam.
Burying your head in the sand will not make it go away.
Apparently you don't believe in carefully reading peoples posts, either. Neither he nor anyone else on this thread offered a 150,000 figure.
To answer the question which you were trying to ask, yes, the study was peer-reviewed. The authors were of Johns Hopkins, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They randomly surveyed households covering 7800 individuals. Since they are using sampling methodologies there are two sources of error: sampling and model. The relative sampling error would be in the low single digit range. The modeling error is nearly impossible to determine, but it would be unusual for it to be off by more than 10%. So figure 15% total to be sure. That leaves you with 95% certainty that there were more than 85,000 Iraqi civilian casualties.
Excellent rebuttal. I wish I had mod points.
Allow me a bit of pessimism.
When does this state of excess cognitive dissonance occur? The one that causes a willingness to re-examine the facts.
If history is any lesson, then this re-examination may be far into the future. I believe that as individuals, in isolation, re-examination can occur; but it will not happen until death for a mass of people unless forced from without (see, Germany.) Hence, short of being conquered, I firmly believe that no matter what course this administration stears us through half of America will believe it was the right path until the day they die.
I'm not so sure.
First off, the definite article is necessary for a virus. Else we would be talking about virus. Which I think we all can agree is wrong. Virusses are another matter entirely.
Perhaps you are confused by the fact that HIV is a proper collective noun. Consider another proper collective noun - the Good Old Party. We can talk about the GOP. Or about Good Old parties. But we cannot talk about GOP. We cannot talk about Republican Party, either. So by the ggparent's peave, we should not be able to talk about HIV.
Regardless, talking about HIV is quite acceptable and normal to normal people.
'On' has a pretty specific meaning. In think you meant 'in.' Regardless, why would you make such a point to begin with. I doubt seriously the well informed g-g-grand parent poster wasn't aware of what you posted. Hence you were just splitting hairs in order to either score some sort of bizarre rhetorical point or support the rediculous notion that nuclear plants are less safe than coal.
You are splitting hairs. The coal was buried underground to begin with.
Well said. And a pet peeve of mine is moderators who mod uninformative droll as informative just because the author sounds like an authority. Another pet peeve is that subsequent moderators don't lower the moderation even when it becomes obvious that the poster is in fact ignorant.
Sigh... Well, now that IBM has sold off their PC unit, all of this is irrelevent.
That's pretty funny. Would mod you up if I had the points.
I know about the rest. But even if I didn't, it would be obvious that the grandparent' remarks don't address the great grandparent's assertions. The grandparent shoud take a course in logic and rhetoric.
Even if what you say is true it is irrelevent to the grandparents post. IBM will keep the profit and therefore by buying IBM you are investing in pioneering work.
The three billin figure is a bit of a puzzle since it doesn't jibe at all with the actual amount our goverment spend ont he UN in 2003 or 2002. My guess is that the discrpency is entirely due to the in-kind spending fine print. I know that the Food programs had 1.5 billion in in-kind spending for 2003, so that is much of the difference right there. There other couple hundred difference is probablywith some other program. I'll have to look up the nature of the in-kind giving. The tax payers may be paying for these in tax deductions if they are coming from Corporatinos. I imagine the story on it is involves paying agro-interest off on some level by the tax payers. Regardless, are you saying you are against 1.5 billion in in-kind food donations to starving people. It's not like UN employees are eating all of that.
Here's a suggestion. Stop opening your mouth. The less you say the smarter you look.
- dopehead. In which case, this is just about some embassies owing NYC property taxes. Well I have news for you, embassies are not part of the UN. They are part of various foreign nations. So take your beef up with those nations, not with the UN.
0 227316
You asked, "should they pay rent?"
You do realize they own the fucking building, don't you? Perhaps you were refering to real estate taxes. But if you were, then you still don't know wtf you are talking about, because the land isn't part of the US it is international territory.
I'm guessing that you are just repeating from memory some lame rant from pick-you-favorite-reactionary-celebrity-oxycontin
RE 3 billion dollars a year. You ignorant slut. Here's a good breakdown of the '03 payments:
http://www.stimson.org/fopo/?SN=FO2002
Basically our annual dues are ~300 million. We pay more to fund peacekeeping operations across the globe. Those are all operations which we chose to be involved in, you might recall we have veto power over such things. And the grand total isn't even in the ball park of 3 billion a year.
RE: Massacres - Where in the UN charter do you see a mandate to be the world's policeman. It simply isn't what the UN was formed to do. Its a straw man argument. Anyway, it has taken on a lot of peacekeeping roles, including roles in all of the places you mentioned, which pretty much makes you look ignorant again - a running theme.
Re: 21 billion dollar scandal - The report comes out in January let's wait and see. That's what my Senator, Hillary, said. Although, it ain't looking good for Kojo. Anyway, I'm not up on the scandal, maybe you can fill me in on the details, but I bet the more details you get the less it will have to do with average New Yorkers and what they ought to think of the UN being in their backyard. In otherwords, I bet it is off topic.
Re:While other countries pay little or nothing - That's like the rich bitchin about paying more in taxes than the poor. The funny thing about being a rich american is that we materially benefit more from a stable world than does some poor bastard in the third world. The key to this is 'material' as in wealth. Our wealth requires stability and so we pay to keep it. That's reality, get over it.