That was an allusion to two things: the German occupation of France (note the evacuation of the fleet, representing Dunkirk, and the return of the fleet, representing Normandy) and the American occupation of Iraq (human police wear ski masks to hide their identities, the Cylons land with good intentions but are rebuffed and considered a threat).
Katee Sackhoff isn't Canadian, she's American. But for the record, Tricia Helfer (who has been seen naked in Playboy) and Grace Park (who has been seen not-quite-naked in Maxim) are Canadian.
Adama is a full-bore atheist. There's a nice moment in the second season where the President is almost dying of cancer (she got better) and Adama makes an announcement to the fleet, asking those who believe to pray for her and those who don't believe to join him in wishing the President a healthy recovery. You have to guess toward the end though that he's starting to see Roslin's side of things though.
Apollo is probably an atheist too, as is Tigh. Billy (the now-dead former presidential aide) was an atheist as well. BSG actually has more atheists than almost any other show on television, which is nice to see for a change.
The Cylons interpreted the incursion as a precursor to an attack, and launched a preemptive assault of their own. It's like the Six Day War, except with genocide.
I guess "philosophy students*" are too stupid t look up the links I've posted elsewhere in this thread... its not those who die who cost the money - its those who don't, and we have to support, both through higher insurance premiums, and through higher medicare / medicaid costs.
That was exactly my point: I was simply suggesting the possibility that if you don't wear a seatbelt, you're more likely to die in an accident, therefore not wearing a seatbelt would decrease the costs for everyone else. (Conversely, if you did wear a seatbelt, you'd be more likely to be horribly injured rather than killed, therefore increasing costs.) Perhaps if you'd studied philosophy you would have learned such things as how to apply logic to arguments or, at the very least, reading comprehension. Although come to think of it, you're supposed to learn reading comprehension in grade school. Pity you didn't.
And while it's truly sweet of you to worry about my future career prospects, don't worry: most of the other philosophy majors I know have moved on to law school (the career prospects for law students are pretty good I've gathered), and I personally am double majoring in computer science.
So assuming that no websites were defaced, no store fronts were vandalized, not one broadcast signal was jeopardized, not zombie bot nets created, then political spam is fine and should be protected?
Wow, talk about not understanding analogies. Mass unsolicited email is the equivalent of vandalism and so forth: it's a means that isn't justified by the ends of political expression.
Ad blocking is also a vibrant industry: witness the popularity of DVR, adblock, and spam filtering. For every idiot out there who buys penis pills from spam mail there are two or three "isolationists" who are willing to actually spend money to filter that crap out of their lives.
Don't be stupid. Driving without wearing a seat belt increases health care and insurance costs for all of us.
I would actually like to see a good empirical argument for that--it's entirely possible that driving without a seat belt decreases health care costs because people who drive without seat belts are more likely to die. Dead people don't need health care. Similarly, I hear that wrongful death is often much less expensive than actually paying for someone's medical care.
Today's airbags require a seatbelt to work properly - the seatbelt holds you in position so that the airbag can do its' job. Also, the airbag doesn't help after the primary collision. Only a seat belt works.
You keep saying that as if it's somehow relevant to our discussion.
No, there are better ways to do this than by abusing the public email system. You're not allowed to vandalize storefronts with political messages, you're not allowed to commit broadcast signal intrusion to spread political messages, you're not allowed to deface websites to spread political messages, and you're not allowed to create a zombie botnet of PC's to spread political messages through spam mail.
Same as the rules against drunk driving, driving while impaired, driving while yacking on your cell phone with ne hand and stuffing your face wth the other, etc.
Those things endanger other people. That's the difference that you don't seem to understand. Driving while impaired is criminally negligent toward the safety of other drivers on the road; not wearing a seatbelt is just a bad idea.
While it is touching for you to care so much about my safety, I assure you it is none of your business. By the way, I'll have you know that I do wear my seatbelt because I am self-centered enough to worry about my own safety. The difference between us is that you are not satisfied to take care of yourself and let others do the same--you're the type of person who wants to control everyone else for their own good, or in other words, a megalomaniac. Throughout history, many people like you have been put against walls and shot. And they all deserved it.
You're completely missing the point here--whether or not I wear a seatbelt principally affects my safety. Not yours. So fuck your paternalistic laws, my safety should be in my hands.
When what you do affects MY costs, I have a right to ask that laws be passed that help lower those costs.
Another note: historically, there hasn't been any public outcry for seatbelt laws. They're just put in place by legislatures who are more interested in having more money to spend than anything. It's pure revenue collection.
For one, seat belts are MUCH more effective in saving lives than air bags are. AND a lot cheaper.
My life, not yours.
Air bags add a cuple of grand to the cost of each new car.
It's also required by law to add them. Do you honestly believe the government is going to repeal that regulation?
Then there's the cost of taking care of the kids of the dead parents, because they're too fucktarded to wear a seat belt. And the cost of medical bills, higher insurance rates, etc.
By that argument you could ban ice cream. The existence of public welfare does not entitle you to become dictator of me.
When what you do affects MY costs, I have a right to ask that laws be passed that help lower those costs.
In that case, comrade, let's ban bacon and ice cream. And euthanize all the retarded people.
How will we advertise the campaigns to feed all the starving artists once you've eliminated commercial advertising?
Unlike you (apparently), I find out about things I enjoy and pay for using means like "research", "word of mouth", "going to the store and looking around", and similar means that aren't nearly as deceptive and annoying.
Look, the problem with advertising is that with rare exception, no one wants to see or hear it. Right now the market is taking care of that through internet ad blockers, television DVRs, and so forth. All I really want is some way for me to tell the postal service to stop delivering this crap to my mailbox. If that hurts your business, nuts to you.
If that were true, they'd have stopped accepting the business years ago.
Nah, the postal service is pretty well restrained by the federal government and the postal union. And even setting that aside, the costs for the mail customer aren't accounted for.
and you should ask how this will play out when there is a mailing list or something for a political action commity or group
If it's a mailing list I didn't explicitly subscribe to, it's spam. Especially if it's Hillary's "make everyone think Obama is secretly an Islamic terrorist" mailing list.
As I said in my response the paid advertisements sent by the post office are there to serve a distinct benefit to the merchants who are sending them.
And a distinct lack thereof to mail recipients and the postal service.
The parable of the broken window is merely a way to reassure and calm the shopkeeper / homeowner that the act is in fact helping the economy so it's not so terrible.
No, the parable points out that the act does not help the economy because replacing the broken window wastes otherwise-useful resources.
The postal worker gets a more steady, consistent flow of mail guaranteeing them work.
Human effort and time is wasted on something unwanted.
The postal service gets more predictable mail routes thereby allowing the system to flow smoothly rather than erratically making the system as a whole more efficient.
Efficiently delivering 10x amount of mail, of course, still costs more than inefficiently delivering x amount of mail.
The printers, artists, paper and ink suppliers are all given work.
Natural resources and human effort are wasted.
The business that sends the flyers gets an increase in traffic to their establishment creating work for their own employees and increasing their bottom lines.
Perhaps the only real benefit here.
Flyer advertsing is far less expensive than radio and television and is more targeted which nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar.
Indeed. You have no idea how well-targeted my junk mail is, let me tell you. This "Resident" fellow's interests are so similar to mine!
Now, regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent in some way or another be it flyer circulation, newspaper flyers, newspaper/magazine adverts, radio/television spots, billboards, bus/bench advertising, direct telephone campaigns, door to door representation or any of a host of other means of getting their name out to the customer base in their target (surrounding) area.
Let's see: newspapers and magazines can be read online with adblockers, radio can be replaced by ad-free alternatives, televisions have DVR now, there's a do-not-call list for telemarketing, and door-to-door marketers get a door slammed in their face. Regardless of medium, there's a high demand for filtering advertising our of our lives, and the postal service should respect this. Currently they don't offer either opt-out or opt-in for junk mail. If they did, the world would be a better place.
You can easily find a way to discredit any or all of the above means of advertising thereby claiming each one in particular as a false economy but the fact remains that advertising remains the best way to garner attention to your business if done right and flyer advertising works and creates many dozens or hundreds of jobs in the process. It will never go away and the postal service will never refuse to deliver these ads so they're a part of our lives. Learn to live with it or suggest a better way to target an area of customers and present it to the local businesses and the post office and see how well it goes over.
What the fuck are you, a lobbyist for the junk mail industry?
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll".
Let there be layoffs then. Maybe these people can be rehired to fix crumbling bridges and overpasses, install 100 Mbps broadband lines to every home in America, or do something else that actually improves the world. There are hundreds of far more serious problems that have to be solved before sorting and delivering junk mail is worth paying people for.
The whole idea that junk mail adverts and junk email adverts are analogous is as much a fallacy as the application of the broken window parable to the situation in the first place.
It's very analogous: spam helps whatever business does the spamming and keeps thousands of people employed in the IT field to filter it.
Having received many of the emails you talk about, that are meant to inform me of some important political news so that I may take action, allow me to say I'm all for having that crap banned as well. Telling people that Obama is secretly a radical Muslim looking to destroy America from within is not a legitimate use of the email system.
This isn't a case of an illegal act, it's a case of a legitimate business model that employs many.
It's a business model that wastes the time and effort of laborers on something we don't want instead of something we want.
it keeps their employees working
The time and effort of postal employees is wasted delivering mail we don't want instead of doing something useful.
it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficient
It increases the number of deliveries they have to make, increasing the hours of labor, fuel, and vehicle maintenance expenditures for no useful end. Delivery routes aren't logic circuits, there's no need for them to have predictable timing. You give every letter carrier a route, and when he finishes his route for the day he goes home.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.
Further resources are wasted recycling and reprocessing this garbage that nobody wanted created in the first place.
Look, it's very popular to think that it's always a good thing to waste effort and natural resources for the sake of stimulating the economy, but that's complete bullshit. And even if it was a good idea, there are far better ways to do it. If we used the same reasoning to continuously build and tear down completely unnecessary pyramids in the Arizona desert, it would accomplish the same goal without annoying people. It would be even better, of course, to invest all that time, effort, and natural resources into something useful.
Educating people about the higher death rates from not wearing seat belts didn't work - a $92.00 fine got > 98% compliance real quick.
I'm sure that in the long run, natural selection would have worked just as well. What business is it of yours whether or not I endanger myself and only myself anyway? It's paternalism, or to be more honest, it's revenue collection masquerading as paternalism. Possibly the worst analogy to spam ever.
I admit that I do not value the "integrity of the body" as a central right. I believe that change can be good, bad, or neutral (or even a mixed bag), and that change alone is not bad. This is probably our largest point of disagreement.
I don't either, although I'm more inclined than you to say that integrity of the body should largely be left up to the owner/inhabitor of said body rather than parents/government/culture/etc.
That's true, since it's logically impossible to maximize it.
Your solution to this dilemma is to draw a neat line between physical and mental, whereas mine is to treat physical and mental as the same thing. That is, I believe that the brain can be physically changed by a person's upbringing and this is no different morally than physically changing other parts of the body. Since my standard can no longer be "don't make any physical changes", my standard becomes "make no harmful physical changes".
My solution is a little more nuanced than that. Circumcision meets a lot of criteria: it's completely irreversible, it violates the integrity of the body, it's completely unnecessary, and it is harmful.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it was used for a few episodes and then quickly destroyed in a senseless act of dramatic symbolism.
That was an allusion to two things: the German occupation of France (note the evacuation of the fleet, representing Dunkirk, and the return of the fleet, representing Normandy) and the American occupation of Iraq (human police wear ski masks to hide their identities, the Cylons land with good intentions but are rebuffed and considered a threat).
Katee Sackhoff isn't Canadian, she's American. But for the record, Tricia Helfer (who has been seen naked in Playboy) and Grace Park (who has been seen not-quite-naked in Maxim) are Canadian.
Adama is a full-bore atheist. There's a nice moment in the second season where the President is almost dying of cancer (she got better) and Adama makes an announcement to the fleet, asking those who believe to pray for her and those who don't believe to join him in wishing the President a healthy recovery. You have to guess toward the end though that he's starting to see Roslin's side of things though.
Apollo is probably an atheist too, as is Tigh. Billy (the now-dead former presidential aide) was an atheist as well. BSG actually has more atheists than almost any other show on television, which is nice to see for a change.
The Cylons interpreted the incursion as a precursor to an attack, and launched a preemptive assault of their own. It's like the Six Day War, except with genocide.
That was exactly my point: I was simply suggesting the possibility that if you don't wear a seatbelt, you're more likely to die in an accident, therefore not wearing a seatbelt would decrease the costs for everyone else. (Conversely, if you did wear a seatbelt, you'd be more likely to be horribly injured rather than killed, therefore increasing costs.) Perhaps if you'd studied philosophy you would have learned such things as how to apply logic to arguments or, at the very least, reading comprehension. Although come to think of it, you're supposed to learn reading comprehension in grade school. Pity you didn't.
And while it's truly sweet of you to worry about my future career prospects, don't worry: most of the other philosophy majors I know have moved on to law school (the career prospects for law students are pretty good I've gathered), and I personally am double majoring in computer science.
Wow, talk about not understanding analogies. Mass unsolicited email is the equivalent of vandalism and so forth: it's a means that isn't justified by the ends of political expression.
Ad blocking is also a vibrant industry: witness the popularity of DVR, adblock, and spam filtering. For every idiot out there who buys penis pills from spam mail there are two or three "isolationists" who are willing to actually spend money to filter that crap out of their lives.
I would actually like to see a good empirical argument for that--it's entirely possible that driving without a seat belt decreases health care costs because people who drive without seat belts are more likely to die. Dead people don't need health care. Similarly, I hear that wrongful death is often much less expensive than actually paying for someone's medical care.
Today's airbags require a seatbelt to work properly - the seatbelt holds you in position so that the airbag can do its' job. Also, the airbag doesn't help after the primary collision. Only a seat belt works.You keep saying that as if it's somehow relevant to our discussion.
No, there are better ways to do this than by abusing the public email system. You're not allowed to vandalize storefronts with political messages, you're not allowed to commit broadcast signal intrusion to spread political messages, you're not allowed to deface websites to spread political messages, and you're not allowed to create a zombie botnet of PC's to spread political messages through spam mail.
Those things endanger other people. That's the difference that you don't seem to understand. Driving while impaired is criminally negligent toward the safety of other drivers on the road; not wearing a seatbelt is just a bad idea.
While it is touching for you to care so much about my safety, I assure you it is none of your business. By the way, I'll have you know that I do wear my seatbelt because I am self-centered enough to worry about my own safety. The difference between us is that you are not satisfied to take care of yourself and let others do the same--you're the type of person who wants to control everyone else for their own good, or in other words, a megalomaniac. Throughout history, many people like you have been put against walls and shot. And they all deserved it.
You're completely missing the point here--whether or not I wear a seatbelt principally affects my safety. Not yours. So fuck your paternalistic laws, my safety should be in my hands.
Another note: historically, there hasn't been any public outcry for seatbelt laws. They're just put in place by legislatures who are more interested in having more money to spend than anything. It's pure revenue collection.
My life, not yours.
Air bags add a cuple of grand to the cost of each new car.It's also required by law to add them. Do you honestly believe the government is going to repeal that regulation?
Then there's the cost of taking care of the kids of the dead parents, because they're too fucktarded to wear a seat belt. And the cost of medical bills, higher insurance rates, etc.By that argument you could ban ice cream. The existence of public welfare does not entitle you to become dictator of me.
When what you do affects MY costs, I have a right to ask that laws be passed that help lower those costs.In that case, comrade, let's ban bacon and ice cream. And euthanize all the retarded people.
Unlike you (apparently), I find out about things I enjoy and pay for using means like "research", "word of mouth", "going to the store and looking around", and similar means that aren't nearly as deceptive and annoying.
Look, the problem with advertising is that with rare exception, no one wants to see or hear it. Right now the market is taking care of that through internet ad blockers, television DVRs, and so forth. All I really want is some way for me to tell the postal service to stop delivering this crap to my mailbox. If that hurts your business, nuts to you.
If that were true, they'd have stopped accepting the business years ago.Nah, the postal service is pretty well restrained by the federal government and the postal union. And even setting that aside, the costs for the mail customer aren't accounted for.
If it's a mailing list I didn't explicitly subscribe to, it's spam. Especially if it's Hillary's "make everyone think Obama is secretly an Islamic terrorist" mailing list.
And a distinct lack thereof to mail recipients and the postal service.
The parable of the broken window is merely a way to reassure and calm the shopkeeper / homeowner that the act is in fact helping the economy so it's not so terrible.No, the parable points out that the act does not help the economy because replacing the broken window wastes otherwise-useful resources.
The postal worker gets a more steady, consistent flow of mail guaranteeing them work.Human effort and time is wasted on something unwanted.
The postal service gets more predictable mail routes thereby allowing the system to flow smoothly rather than erratically making the system as a whole more efficient.Efficiently delivering 10x amount of mail, of course, still costs more than inefficiently delivering x amount of mail.
The printers, artists, paper and ink suppliers are all given work.Natural resources and human effort are wasted.
The business that sends the flyers gets an increase in traffic to their establishment creating work for their own employees and increasing their bottom lines.Perhaps the only real benefit here.
Flyer advertsing is far less expensive than radio and television and is more targeted which nets a far better cost:benefit ratio for their advertising dollar.Indeed. You have no idea how well-targeted my junk mail is, let me tell you. This "Resident" fellow's interests are so similar to mine!
Now, regardless of medium, that dollar will be spent in some way or another be it flyer circulation, newspaper flyers, newspaper/magazine adverts, radio/television spots, billboards, bus/bench advertising, direct telephone campaigns, door to door representation or any of a host of other means of getting their name out to the customer base in their target (surrounding) area.Let's see: newspapers and magazines can be read online with adblockers, radio can be replaced by ad-free alternatives, televisions have DVR now, there's a do-not-call list for telemarketing, and door-to-door marketers get a door slammed in their face. Regardless of medium, there's a high demand for filtering advertising our of our lives, and the postal service should respect this. Currently they don't offer either opt-out or opt-in for junk mail. If they did, the world would be a better place.
You can easily find a way to discredit any or all of the above means of advertising thereby claiming each one in particular as a false economy but the fact remains that advertising remains the best way to garner attention to your business if done right and flyer advertising works and creates many dozens or hundreds of jobs in the process. It will never go away and the postal service will never refuse to deliver these ads so they're a part of our lives. Learn to live with it or suggest a better way to target an area of customers and present it to the local businesses and the post office and see how well it goes over.What the fuck are you, a lobbyist for the junk mail industry?
You mean the ones who are left after the massive rounds of layoffs. "More efficient" in this case means "fewer people on the payroll".Let there be layoffs then. Maybe these people can be rehired to fix crumbling bridges and overpasses, install 100 Mbps broadband lines to every home in America, or do something else that actually improves the world. There are hundreds of far more serious problems that have to be solved before sorting and delivering junk mail is worth paying people for.
The whole idea that junk mail adverts and junk email adverts are analogous is as much a fallacy as the application of the broken window parable to the situation in the first place.It's very analogous: spam helps whatever business does the spamming and keeps thousands of people employed in the IT field to filter it.
Having received many of the emails you talk about, that are meant to inform me of some important political news so that I may take action, allow me to say I'm all for having that crap banned as well. Telling people that Obama is secretly a radical Muslim looking to destroy America from within is not a legitimate use of the email system.
It's a business model that wastes the time and effort of laborers on something we don't want instead of something we want.
it keeps their employees workingThe time and effort of postal employees is wasted delivering mail we don't want instead of doing something useful.
it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficientIt increases the number of deliveries they have to make, increasing the hours of labor, fuel, and vehicle maintenance expenditures for no useful end. Delivery routes aren't logic circuits, there's no need for them to have predictable timing. You give every letter carrier a route, and when he finishes his route for the day he goes home.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.Further resources are wasted recycling and reprocessing this garbage that nobody wanted created in the first place.
Look, it's very popular to think that it's always a good thing to waste effort and natural resources for the sake of stimulating the economy, but that's complete bullshit. And even if it was a good idea, there are far better ways to do it. If we used the same reasoning to continuously build and tear down completely unnecessary pyramids in the Arizona desert, it would accomplish the same goal without annoying people. It would be even better, of course, to invest all that time, effort, and natural resources into something useful.
I'm sure that in the long run, natural selection would have worked just as well. What business is it of yours whether or not I endanger myself and only myself anyway? It's paternalism, or to be more honest, it's revenue collection masquerading as paternalism. Possibly the worst analogy to spam ever.
Ah, thanks. I was starting to wonder why he was buying 3 quarts of alcohol, tobacco, and firearms.
I don't either, although I'm more inclined than you to say that integrity of the body should largely be left up to the owner/inhabitor of said body rather than parents/government/culture/etc.
That's true, since it's logically impossible to maximize it.
Your solution to this dilemma is to draw a neat line between physical and mental, whereas mine is to treat physical and mental as the same thing. That is, I believe that the brain can be physically changed by a person's upbringing and this is no different morally than physically changing other parts of the body. Since my standard can no longer be "don't make any physical changes", my standard becomes "make no harmful physical changes".My solution is a little more nuanced than that. Circumcision meets a lot of criteria: it's completely irreversible, it violates the integrity of the body, it's completely unnecessary, and it is harmful.
Look up the difference between a question and a complaint.
I wasn't complaining, I was calling you out for what you were. A flamewar goes both ways, sheepfucker.