The federal government can already make it so that any foreign corp that contracts for this sort of work, in actual violation of the U.S. law, has its employees and owners put on the personal-non-grata lists, if it wants to. They become not eligble for visas, can't fly through the U.S. carriers, and so on. That doesn't sound like much of a big deal for some people, but the U.S. forwards the lists to any and all allied or neutral governments so it can widely restrict the person's ability to travel or do business just about anywhere - worse, what they don't include is a qualification; that is, there's usually no markings that say person A is a suspected terrorist, and person B is only a violator of the do-not-call regulation.
I have heard of one case where a British employee of a minor publisher got placed on the lists for an in-absentia libel (that is, the evidence supported the claim he libeled someone under U.S. law, but not under British law's different standards for libel, and he was in Britain at the time, so no actual charges could be filed, a fact he was apparently counting on.). He has since aledged that MI-5 are the people who broke down his door at 2 am, and smashed out three of his teeth in a 'brisk' personal Q&A session. Unless the marketers are themselves a big corporation, DirecTV sized or so, getting on the non-grata lists can really suck, and it's not like the USA is responsible if some other government 'over-reacts'.
The point is, what if we make smarter animals, and then keep experimenting on them like they were still the same as their ancestors. First, it's logically indefensable - a smarter mouse is what it is, not something that can be properly treated as a Heisen-mouse, half smart and half dumb, whichever suits the society at the time. Second it's a moral issue - how can you make an experimental animal smarter without simultaniously giving it more understanding that it is caged, totally controlled, and subject to pain and premature death as a result of being an experimental subject? In other words, making animals smarter will in and of itself increase their suffering in an experimental environment unless making them smarter comes with recognition of associated rights.
I had to go back and re-read your comment to see you were talking about making animals smarter and then using them for some very ethical purposes such as search and rescue. What you're describing there seems like a quite possible win/win situation, and yes, I agree the society probably should want to persue such options. I hope you will consider the spin-doctors who will doubtless use arguements phrased much like yours to claim that making animals smarter is a way of compensating them for participating in research trials that involve close confinement, surgery, and even vivisection and try to get society to treat that as a win/win also.
Given your "marginalized nutjob super-minority" comment, I would worry somewhat about how much care and concern you would show if you were the one making these ethical decisions. If your most major goal in this thread is to suggest animals be improved for situations where both the animals and humans can benefit simultaneously, I think comments like that undermine you own position more than they help. You've actually made some very good points - you don't need to undercut all the other sides of the debate.
The Witch invokes the Law as her excuse to put the human boy to death. The boy has violated the law and all who violate the law are worthy of death. Aslan therefore dies for someone else's violation of the law, but has himself violated none. Afterwards Aslan speaks of a deeper law that underlies the ones the witch has invoked.
Aslan is also the son of the Emperor over the Sea, who rules a great many lands ("In my father's house, there are many mansions").
From other books, the Emperor made all the lands from darkness and chaos, there's a donkey figure who is set up as the "Anti-Aslan" at Narnia's end times, Narnia suffers its own apocalipse, and the childeren all go to heaven in the end.
Oh, and there's a bunch of this stuff in LotR too. I sincerely hope this doesn't diminish your enjoyment of either work.
It's flamebait becuase he said the equivalent of "People have chosen to see the Republican party as pro George Bush." or "People have chosen to see Marx's "Das Kapital" as anti-capitalism". People aren't reading anything into the Narnia movie that was just put there by some ad campaign, after the fact, they are just seeing what's really there all along in the books.
Also, it's the evangelical branch of Christianity that tends to have some problems with fantasy, as witness the silly fuss about the Harry Potter movies. Narnia is for Episcopalians (Lewis was Anglican, which is essentially what they call Episcopalians on the east side of the Atlantic ocean). Unless you want to lump all those Methodists, Lutherans, and even Roman Catholics in there as evangelicals...
If anything, the studio is openly taking a risk of a backlash from some fantasy sensitive fundamentalists types that consider Lewis's work non-Christian and even Satanic in disguise. The creators could have soft pedaled the Christian aspects and made Narnia into just another Disney-oid film and probably made just as much money, or more, while avoiding this risk. So he, and you, are accusing people of selling out when the sole evidence available suggests they have deliberately avoided selling out.
Cal is about 12% of the US population, all by itself. Cal 'liberalized' no fault divorce law ahead of any other state by several years, further skewing any results. Cal still has the highest single divorce rate in the country, followed by Nevada which does not break down divorces to show a seperate talley for non-state residents that had quicky marriages in Reno and then sought divorce soon after, further biasing the results again. I also mentioned flaws with at least two other states besides Cal, LA, and now NV. That's five out of 50, how many more problems would I have to find with how many more states before it counts? I also found these flaws in more than just one reference, and your "ONE" is a misquote, one I am now starting to believe is deliberate. I don't 'somehow think' all this would affect results, it has affected them. Burden of Proof it hasn't is squarely on you.
Your sole source consulted five other people as assistants, ALL militant atheists, ALL politically active for that cause before they ever took a stand on fundamentalism or divorce. She apparently avoided consulting representitives of any other groups, or alternately, (my interpretation) some of them refused to serve once her bias became apparent. She chose no one who opposed any fundamentalist group's claims about divorce on any other grounds than Atheism, ignored all the established political groups that have also taken a stand. She didn't seek out any consultant whos primary job was with say, the ACLU, the Jewish Defense League, or the Unitarian Church, even though such groups all have interests in this issue and people who are well qualified to speak on it as it relates to their field, and certainly are politically of the opposite camp from the religious right. She apparently also didn't ask any help of authors for such prominent publications as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal unless I'm missing some citations there, although several people with outstanding credentials have written reams on the subject of divorce in America for these publications.
I checked a few of the references she cited. Most that I could swiftly trace had serious flaws, as I indicated previously. Since doing this included, as just one part of a few hour's tracing, all the 30 most commonly hit sites on the web for the simple terms "US" "divorce" "rates", taken seperately as a typical non-expert would, it appears to be your contention that the web doesn't have very good info on this, and only your source does. This is Slashdot. If only people who will bother to pay for your book and paper copies of its 900 or so quoted sources are alowed to hold a contrary opinion, no one here will gainsay you. Personally, I had to get it from the library, as it's rather pricely for me otherwise
Oh, and it wasn't a poor ad hominem, it was a damned good one. One thing I noticed quickly was that the book's author failed to reveal the fact that she stood on a podium together with one of the "scholarly and credible" sources she cited and got an award from an Atheist organization at the same time he did. No particular reason she had to, but she made it sound like her only prior contact with him was reading his monograph. Those group photos show lots of people, not just one or two. They have the names of everybody getting awards at those meetings attached, and it's not hard to cross index those names with names on papers she cited, and see how many turn up.
I hinted at what I found when I did that, expecting that if anyone was interested in following it up, they would do a little actual research. I'll go ahead and reveal what I just hinted at, just working through the references from the first chapter, as I looked up the author(s) on the web, I quickly found that, in a substantial majority of cases, they were connected to the same two Atheist organizations, which themselves appear to have largely overlapping memberships from the portions they have made public. I have no idea if all 900 pubs
In fact, if Sony's hardware division loses marketshare, the board of directors will give more emphasis to the music division. They will pay higher saleries to the upper management of that division, give it a bigger budget, and so on.
Sony needs to see hardware as a source of potential profits, and music, (especially DRM'ed music), as a source of losses that threaten to drag the whole company down. The lawsuits already filed and in process will definitely do that, if they don't grow big enough to actually destroy the company and not just threaten it. There is no way a huge fine from various state and national governments can be misinterpreted as either a general market condition, a consumer resonse to poor marketing, or piracy, so in this case, a boycott is superfluous at best and negative at worst.
You actually think you can make this claim, and then promise to remain civil in the next paragraph or two? If this guy speaks for you, then I won't debate you, or even better, try for a discourse where the truth is the goal instead of merely winning debate points. I simply won't do it, period. If he doesn't, I'd rather try for a dialog than a debate, but the debate structure is better than nothing if that's what you want. That first point is simply not negotiable - I don't waste time with people who come into the arguement already wanting to slap my face before they've even heard my views.
"Sure we can. Go" No - that's my condition - I don't debate people who start off by expressing their intent to 'slap me in the face', period. No, I'm not paranoid, Yes I know it's only a metaphorical slap, but still, we can't have a debate because it takes two to tango, and I won't enter into a voluntary relationship with someone who expresses a prexisting desire to harm me. I'm not here to humilate anybody. I don't want to make the people who think ID can't be put on a scientific footing all look like fools, or grind them down, or get a bunch of people who don't really understand the issues to clap harder for my side and call that "winning", or any of that sort of thing. I'm not here to make YOU personally look bad either, nor to quote back (or misquote) what you say in an effort to convince all Slashdom that I won some intangible point here. I might be interested in proving you are wrong on some points, if in fact you are, but I see no reason to try to prove you didn't think, racinate, and judge, gather facts and engage in careful consideration, or otherwise do what all humans do at their best. You may be wrong, but very smart people have been wrong before, and very decent, honorable, and dedicated people have been wrong as well.
You can swear you won't personally stoop to threatening me all you want, but what real difference does that make, if you then turn around and get quotes and references to bolster your arguements from people who do want to slap somebody's face, and never even notice that's where you are getting them from? I don't even mind if you quote some of them, but I do want the right to point out when other statements might show they are arguing from an emotional dislike and not an interest in the truth. Sure, some of what they say may be facts I really should consider, but practically speaking, why should I wade through the added abuse? People who sincerely want to convince me I'm wrong just might have my own interests at heart (at least 1 time in 10), but people who equate reasoned debate with force, getting even, getting one up, or revenge simply never do.
You really can't get around it. If you are of this professor's persuasion on the issue of slapping people's faces, I won't waste my time debating you further. Yes, you do have to account for how your opinions overlap or differ with the professor, at least to me, and on this sole point of motive. Refuse to do so, and I, (doubtless due to my persecution complex), won't go any further. I'm not asking you to account to everyone else on Slashdot, or in Kansas, or whatever, that's up to you and them.
Again, it takes two to make a dialog. I say what he has done has made me less willing to engage in that dialog, without additional assurances. It really doen't matter if it has made you less willing too, or not, as in a voluntary situation, it only takes one party to become reluctant. If you don't care what I think, that reluctance shouldn't matter, but alternately, if it doesn't matter, then you don't care what I think, so why discuss anything. I point out you have asked for no less than four such assurances, while I have asked for only one. Can you honestly claim that none of those four conditions was motivated in any part by any actions of other persons on the pro ID side of the debate? You want me to promise I'm not representing a whole h
It stops being a persecution complex when the person who disagrees with you expresses a personal desire to slap you in the face (assuming they have any actual power to act against you). The "fundies" will milk this sort of behavior for all its worth (and Pat Robertson will doubtless milk it for far more), and if you want to speak out against their opinions, you will find you need to distance yourself from people whose moves are "unnecessarily antagonistic", or your ship will go down with theirs.
Personally, I'd debate some of your opinions on the actual topic of ID, but we're both too busy now discussing this meta-topic of what tactics are fair to use in that debate, so we can't (This professor has thus harmed you as well as me by making us waste more time on peripheral issues and leave the main topic we'd probably both prefer to address.), and since I dcount myself pretty far from a "fundie" as well, he hasn't apologised to either of us. He should have had to apologise to all people on any side of an issue that were willing to have a reasonable and fair minded dialogue on anything.
Yeah, it's amazing how many people in this thread have said "This is like X, and you can't sue over/prosecute/get a court order over X", but for most of their X's, the fact is, people can and do. Far from every organization that claims common carrier status as a defense wins in court, for just one example. The law is full of cases where a claim designed to limit liability actually didn't.
Analogies are slippery things at best, but when the conclusion claimed from them is itself definitely false, there goes any remaining value.
It's like making stone soup. Everyone knows only Shriners can make stone soup in Delaware. No, it's like Wikipedia is like a plasma bank, and John Seigerwhatzis is like Dracula, and since dead people can't sue we should all grab soda straws and...
Haven't any more than a guess. Do I count the cases involving food prep people who worked illegally in the industry while having Hep C or do I assume all employees really washed their hands like the sign says they must, AND that following the sign was sufficient? If I assume some of those employees didn't follow the rules OR that the law they violated was a good law, then the answer is, "At least some, maybe 20-50,000 or so nationwide over the last 10 years, but that's just a first approximation, and I'd be quite happy to find out it's lower".
The larger point is still, it is not enough to design a toilet or urinal that is more ecologically sound if you don't also take into account the new design's effect on the spread of infectious diseases, and it's not enough to ensure that a design is safe if used according to directions unless you also look at what can go wrong if the directions aren't followed.
The spray from existing flush designs is a health risk (moderate rather than major, but still a risk). We need designs that don't waste water AND reduce that risk. We could also use education campaigns to get more people to bother with cleaning the things more often and such, but that's a seperate issue.
Here's a quote re: The Fundamentals of Extremism, from its publisher:
"Ms. Blaker, an ardent supporter of the separation of church and state and a syndicated journalist and writer (see The Wall(TM)), worked with five experts on Christian fundamentalism: Edwin Frederick Kagin, an attorney and founder of Camp Quest, a summer camp for children of atheists and freethinkers; Bobbie Kirkhart, a retired teacher and social worker with abused children and President of Atheist Alliance International; John Suarez, a former professor of psychiatry and a member of the Board of Trustees for Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Herb Silverman, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and National Board Member of the American Humanist Association; and Edward M. Buckner, Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
If you want to talk about poor sources, here's a site that agrees mostly with you, also one of the very top hits from Google:
1. It's interesting that this site too admits at one point that data for Louisiana is lacking, and again lists the most fundamentalist states without including Louisiana. 2. The site has a marvelous quote from Ron Barrier "The Spokespersonn (sic) for American Atheists" about why atheists do better than fundamentalists at keeping marriages together. The quote is right under a table that shows the highest divorce rate is not for fundamentalists, but for Jews, which is generally not what most of us would consider a fundmentalist sect. The 3% difference between Jews (30% divorces, by this source) and "Born Again Christians" (27%) and the similar sized difference between "Born again" and "Other" Christians (24%) are both treated as irrelevant and not needing explanation or indicating any ethical or moral superiority one way or the other. The similar 3% difference between "Other Christians and Atheists (21%) is (according to Ron) proof of "Atheist ethical superiority". Oh, just incidentally, this Ron Barrier is one of the authors of several of those 900 scholarly works you mentioned, and the organization sponsoring this link is apparently in the book too.
In the section about regional differences, a table featuring the higher divorce rates in the south is followed by text putting Arizona in the southern region, and Nevada and Oklahoma in the bible belt. The whole site again specifically skips over Cal, but fails to admit it. Ooops, the preparers of this site are using the same sources quoted in your Book. Far from having done their own research, they all seem to be working starting from the exact same government studies...
You might want to Google for good ole' Ron and Bobbie together or other such combinations (Ron hangs around with Ed a lot too)(The photos of them standing side by side on the dias at the awards ceremony together are especially nice). The authors you cite, and the authors of the 900 other scolarly works they cited in turn, mostly appear to comprise a small overlapping pool of people the rest of us would call militant atheists, and just from half an hour or so on the net, I've found several cases where they have been disingenious with the facts, made mistakes in their use of statistical methods and scientific terms, and otherwise shown that their bias is strongly influencing what should be an objective issue. I don't have time to trace every one of those 900 works to show whether they come from such sloppy sources or not. I'm sure you can skip over the top 10 or 20 net sites, pick some search terms, and find some that aren't such poor sources, and you can similarly argue your conclusions entirely from print sources if you choose, but I'm not willing to buy all those scholarly works and cross check, especially since I turned up things that seem to indicate major flaws in this work on the first, second, and now third sites Google gave me looking for a straight forward search term like US Divorce Rate.
So yes, based on what I have seen so far, your source is wrong, yep.
Before deciding that refusing to take responsibility is epidemic, let's look at the streetlight accident at the Thanksgiving parade. The two women had what turned out to be relatively minor injuries. The parade organizers have covered the real medical expenses, and offered to give the women seats in the reviewing stand next year. The women have said publicly that they have no intention of sueing, and think the parade organizers are generally swell people, and they are very grateful for those nice seats, etc. Just about everyone agrees that there were safety precautions in effect, and they were mostly well thought out, that the crews got good training, and so on. The crew is still saying that maybe they could have tried harder, and they'll be even carefuller next year. There supervisors are saying they will look for additional safety methods anyway. The news media generally avoided sensationalizing the accident, and a couple of them have still appologized if anyone got the impression it was more serious than it actually was. There were a couple of news outlets that came off as looking for someone in particular to blame - If anyone takes soft guy's suggestion, they might start with the ones that seemed eager to point fingers before all the facts were in. You just don't hear nearly as much about these common sorts of resolutions as the ones considered hot news.
It has been shown that the divorce rate among the most fundamentalist christians is TWICE that of the divorce rate among atheists and agnostics - and that the divorce rate between the two is pretty much linearly related to the level of fundamentalism the couple is involved in.
What's the marriage rate compared between the two groups? Are fundies getting divorced more often because they are more likely to get married in the first place?
Here's some of the interesting parts:
The last-reported U.S. divorce rate for a calendar year, available as of May, 2005, is 0.38% divorces per capita per year,... given the latest Monthly Vital Statistics Report .
Notes on understanding this per capita rate:
* This rate is only for the states that keep track of the number of divorces.
California, Colorado, Indiana and Louisiana do not.
* Since every divorce involves two people, the percentage becomes somewhat more meaningful if you double it. E.g., 0.74% of the entire population gets divorced every year.
* A rate per married people, instead of per straight population, would be even more helpful, but we do not know of a consistent source for that number. If you do, please tell us.
So California (a state generally on the low end in terms of fundamentalists, one which had progressive divorce laws earlier than any other state and is still generally considered to have some of the most liberal (in the standard not the right-wing sense) divorce laws today, and the state with the most population of all, doesn't keep track of the needed data. That's a transcendentally huge source of error right there. Louisiana, one of the states that has the highest portion of self described fundamentalists, doesn't either, but at least they don't have 35.9 million people. From the last note, the official rates also don't consistently collate to how many people were ever officially married so they could officially divorce. Dachannien's first closing question is presumably unanswerable without that data, which means the second question can't be answered either.
There is absolutely nothing anyone can say that can't be made absurd by taking it in your own mind to rediculous lengths the original utterer never even implied, and then asking the sort of questions you've chosen. With this method any pro-death penalty arguement can be shot down with a quick "So I suppose you're for hanging litterers then?". Any anti-death penalty arguement can equally be shot down with "So we just let murderers and rapists go free then?".
There is not one, single thing you yourself can positively assert that isn't subject to this sort of undercutting, and you are using a weapon that, if its fair to use it here, makes every single opinion you yourself hold automatically foolish in turn when it's used on you.
Your approach is why lawyers write 300 page contracts that spell out every last detail of what we aren't allowed to do with software - because some fool says "But what if I use a hex editor - it isn't decompiling it if I don't use a complier backwards, is it? So we get 30 synonyms for reverse engineering in one EULA.
There's such a thing as shedding more light on a subject, and there's creating a smoke cloud instead. You're trying for a nasty black cloud here - does the mere thought the 10 commandments might be genuinely divinely inspired scare you that much? (Yes, I just stooped to somewhere still well above your level, and it's still admittedly a cheap shot.)
I Agree that working 60+ steadily is foolish. Any firm that runs on a regular supply and demand basis and can't find full time people enough to divide the work into 40 Hour parcels has problems entirely of its own making, and that sounds like a firm that is going to pass on many of those problems to employees. On the other hand there are some firms where those problems are imposed by the very nature of the business model, and not the fault of management. Doing 60+ or even 80+ occasionally for one of these can be a great idea. For example, take Tax Prep firms. In the US, they all have a really steep peak in workload in late January and another Peak in April, Because just about everyone wants to file as early as possible if they are getting a refund, or as late as possible if they owe. Their coders have to update the software in late november-december, because Congress never finalizes the changes until nearly the first of the new year. There's always a lot of updates needed then, as Congress ALWAYS changes the tax code, and ALWAYS in some ways they haven't discussed publicly until the last moment (This is one of very few circumstances where the word always is clinically accurate and not hyperbole). Between April and November, there's literally no workload at all for 90-95% of the employees.
There are bound to be other businesses with variants on that last problem - i.e. anyone who relies heavily on Federal Law enforcement, OSHA, DOE, or DOD related contracts can expect a huge influx of new rules that affect code in the last month or so of the year. These firms all rely on 60 Hr+ weeks in their respective peak seasons, and often seasonal lay offs the rest of the year. The better ones usually pay worth such conditions too - there's nothing like getting 60 K for 3 months work in an area where the average income is 17 K., and realizing that your toughest decision come May is whether you want to find something else to try and make 100-120 K total or just be a beach bum until next February or so. I know people who hiked the whole Appalachian Trail rather than bother to get a second job that year.
I've already argued why this is wrong with other posters, and you might want to read some of those posts, but this time, I'll take just one disease. Hepatitus C commonly damages the kidneys enough that it frequently begins to be present in the urine in copious amounts within two weeks or less of initial infection. It is also a very hardy disease, able to tolerate conditions such as low levels of chlorination that will kill many other germs within milliseconds for significant time. You may have a "feeling that's pretty rare", but it's totally unsupported by the facts.
Here's an estimate on just how many people currently have Hep C in the USA alone. That C. Everett Koop guy may look familiar.
"unless there's something kind of wrong with you" is effectively slang for type two Diabetes in this case. Given that there are estimated to be upwards of a million undiagnosed borderline type two diabetics in the US today, what's your point? Your "there shouldn't be" has over a million exceptions just from that problem alone. When you include that the standard test is only reliable if taken at least an hour after eating, and almost all clinically normal people will show significant glucose if they urinate within 15 minutes of drinking a typical large fast food restaurant soda, that ups the numbers to 10's of millions on a typical day. So the original poster was right, this is an extremely significant factor in design.
Ouch, sorry about the missed tag there. That's supposed to be an aren't, and there's a couple of carriage returns or equivalents that aren't needed to parse the sentence. My profound appologies. If I wasn't so sleepy from all the Thanksgiving Triptophan that wasn't really in my turkey in sufficient amounts to explain it, I'd think of a good explanation.
We are no longer citizens to many of the politicians that are
n't
being brought up in this discussion (until now). We are taxpayers - here only to contribute to their goals and move on.
What's frightening is that I can do the substitution above so easily.
The combination of the two is an ongoing reality. There are profound similarities between the loss of power and autonomy the average person is suffering from being treated as just a consumer by businesses and the losses that come from being just the arbitrary recipient of revokable granted rights by the government. Just because businesses, by themselves, can't implement Gulags, doesn't mean the real consequences of the consumerist attitude aren't enormously harmful.
You've just done a very good job of reducing several paragraphs from the article to a nice, simple form without oversimplifying them. Your last clause, clarifying that the results have to be right, not just in the aggregate, but seperately, for this research to be significant, is an especially good example of how not to oversimplify a scientific subject.
One more pedantic point though - I've never liked the use of the word 'collapse' in the Copenhagen interpretation. It has a certain negative connotation re. the post quantum state, like things fall down into existence from some superior state above existence. It seems to prejudice the arguement, by implying that probabilities become discrete things by comeing forth from a sort of Numenon, or Platonic Ideal, or maybe the literal Mind of God. While personally, I actually prefer that interpretation, it's only fair to recognize the alternatives for all the Non-theists out there. Since you show a very good grasp of the subject, I urge you to look at more neutral words such as 'Reification', which is admittedly an uncommon word, but which I personally think is a much better word for most QM discussions, because it doesn't shift the area of discourse into abstract philosophy nearly so much. Please don't take this as critical of your post, which is overall, one of a mere dozen or so responses in this thread that have focussed mostly on the actual science.
Actually they're just wanting you to chop the birds, mice, and rabbits up, marinate them in rich sauces. put them in little cans, and serve them back at the appropraite times. Please, don't ever think a cat feels gratitude. (Writing this post was interrupted by Socks and Frosty wanting more turkey and cheese, "Me-NOW, DAMMIT!".).
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The federal government can already make it so that any foreign corp that contracts for this sort of work, in actual violation of the U.S. law, has its employees and owners put on the personal-non-grata lists, if it wants to. They become not eligble for visas, can't fly through the U.S. carriers, and so on. That doesn't sound like much of a big deal for some people, but the U.S. forwards the lists to any and all allied or neutral governments so it can widely restrict the person's ability to travel or do business just about anywhere - worse, what they don't include is a qualification; that is, there's usually no markings that say person A is a suspected terrorist, and person B is only a violator of the do-not-call regulation.
I have heard of one case where a British employee of a minor publisher got placed on the lists for an in-absentia libel (that is, the evidence supported the claim he libeled someone under U.S. law, but not under British law's different standards for libel, and he was in Britain at the time, so no actual charges could be filed, a fact he was apparently counting on.). He has since aledged that MI-5 are the people who broke down his door at 2 am, and smashed out three of his teeth in a 'brisk' personal Q&A session. Unless the marketers are themselves a big corporation, DirecTV sized or so, getting on the non-grata lists can really suck, and it's not like the USA is responsible if some other government 'over-reacts'.
The point is, what if we make smarter animals, and then keep experimenting on them like they were still the same as their ancestors. First, it's logically indefensable - a smarter mouse is what it is, not something that can be properly treated as a Heisen-mouse, half smart and half dumb, whichever suits the society at the time. Second it's a moral issue - how can you make an experimental animal smarter without simultaniously giving it more understanding that it is caged, totally controlled, and subject to pain and premature death as a result of being an experimental subject? In other words, making animals smarter will in and of itself increase their suffering in an experimental environment unless making them smarter comes with recognition of associated rights.
I had to go back and re-read your comment to see you were talking about making animals smarter and then using them for some very ethical purposes such as search and rescue. What you're describing there seems like a quite possible win/win situation, and yes, I agree the society probably should want to persue such options. I hope you will consider the spin-doctors who will doubtless use arguements phrased much like yours to claim that making animals smarter is a way of compensating them for participating in research trials that involve close confinement, surgery, and even vivisection and try to get society to treat that as a win/win also.
Given your "marginalized nutjob super-minority" comment, I would worry somewhat about how much care and concern you would show if you were the one making these ethical decisions. If your most major goal in this thread is to suggest animals be improved for situations where both the animals and humans can benefit simultaneously, I think comments like that undermine you own position more than they help. You've actually made some very good points - you don't need to undercut all the other sides of the debate.
The Witch invokes the Law as her excuse to put the human boy to death. The boy has violated the law and all who violate the law are worthy of death. Aslan therefore dies for someone else's violation of the law, but has himself violated none. Afterwards Aslan speaks of a deeper law that underlies the ones the witch has invoked.
Aslan is also the son of the Emperor over the Sea, who rules a great many lands ("In my father's house, there are many mansions").
From other books, the Emperor made all the lands from darkness and chaos, there's a donkey figure who is set up as the "Anti-Aslan" at Narnia's end times, Narnia suffers its own apocalipse, and the childeren all go to heaven in the end.
Oh, and there's a bunch of this stuff in LotR too. I sincerely hope this doesn't diminish your enjoyment of either work.
It's flamebait becuase he said the equivalent of "People have chosen to see the Republican party as pro George Bush." or "People have chosen to see Marx's "Das Kapital" as anti-capitalism". People aren't reading anything into the Narnia movie that was just put there by some ad campaign, after the fact, they are just seeing what's really there all along in the books.
Also, it's the evangelical branch of Christianity that tends to have some problems with fantasy, as witness the silly fuss about the Harry Potter movies. Narnia is for Episcopalians (Lewis was Anglican, which is essentially what they call Episcopalians on the east side of the Atlantic ocean). Unless you want to lump all those Methodists, Lutherans, and even Roman Catholics in there as evangelicals...
If anything, the studio is openly taking a risk of a backlash from some fantasy sensitive fundamentalists types that consider Lewis's work non-Christian and even Satanic in disguise. The creators could have soft pedaled the Christian aspects and made Narnia into just another Disney-oid film and probably made just as much money, or more, while avoiding this risk. So he, and you, are accusing people of selling out when the sole evidence available suggests they have deliberately avoided selling out.
Cal is about 12% of the US population, all by itself. Cal 'liberalized' no fault divorce law ahead of any other state by several years, further skewing any results. Cal still has the highest single divorce rate in the country, followed by Nevada which does not break down divorces to show a seperate talley for non-state residents that had quicky marriages in Reno and then sought divorce soon after, further biasing the results again. I also mentioned flaws with at least two other states besides Cal, LA, and now NV. That's five out of 50, how many more problems would I have to find with how many more states before it counts? I also found these flaws in more than just one reference, and your "ONE" is a misquote, one I am now starting to believe is deliberate. I don't 'somehow think' all this would affect results, it has affected them. Burden of Proof it hasn't is squarely on you.
Your sole source consulted five other people as assistants, ALL militant atheists, ALL politically active for that cause before they ever took a stand on fundamentalism or divorce. She apparently avoided consulting representitives of any other groups, or alternately, (my interpretation) some of them refused to serve once her bias became apparent. She chose no one who opposed any fundamentalist group's claims about divorce on any other grounds than Atheism, ignored all the established political groups that have also taken a stand. She didn't seek out any consultant whos primary job was with say, the ACLU, the Jewish Defense League, or the Unitarian Church, even though such groups all have interests in this issue and people who are well qualified to speak on it as it relates to their field, and certainly are politically of the opposite camp from the religious right. She apparently also didn't ask any help of authors for such prominent publications as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal unless I'm missing some citations there, although several people with outstanding credentials have written reams on the subject of divorce in America for these publications.
I checked a few of the references she cited. Most that I could swiftly trace had serious flaws, as I indicated previously. Since doing this included, as just one part of a few hour's tracing, all the 30 most commonly hit sites on the web for the simple terms "US" "divorce" "rates", taken seperately as a typical non-expert would, it appears to be your contention that the web doesn't have very good info on this, and only your source does. This is Slashdot. If only people who will bother to pay for your book and paper copies of its 900 or so quoted sources are alowed to hold a contrary opinion, no one here will gainsay you. Personally, I had to get it from the library, as it's rather pricely for me otherwise
Oh, and it wasn't a poor ad hominem, it was a damned good one. One thing I noticed quickly was that the book's author failed to reveal the fact that she stood on a podium together with one of the "scholarly and credible" sources she cited and got an award from an Atheist organization at the same time he did. No particular reason she had to, but she made it sound like her only prior contact with him was reading his monograph. Those group photos show lots of people, not just one or two. They have the names of everybody getting awards at those meetings attached, and it's not hard to cross index those names with names on papers she cited, and see how many turn up.
I hinted at what I found when I did that, expecting that if anyone was interested in following it up, they would do a little actual research. I'll go ahead and reveal what I just hinted at, just working through the references from the first chapter, as I looked up the author(s) on the web, I quickly found that, in a substantial majority of cases, they were connected to the same two Atheist organizations, which themselves appear to have largely overlapping memberships from the portions they have made public. I have no idea if all 900 pubs
In fact, if Sony's hardware division loses marketshare, the board of directors will give more emphasis to the music division. They will pay higher saleries to the upper management of that division, give it a bigger budget, and so on.
Sony needs to see hardware as a source of potential profits, and music, (especially DRM'ed music), as a source of losses that threaten to drag the whole company down. The lawsuits already filed and in process will definitely do that, if they don't grow big enough to actually destroy the company and not just threaten it. There is no way a huge fine from various state and national governments can be misinterpreted as either a general market condition, a consumer resonse to poor marketing, or piracy, so in this case, a boycott is superfluous at best and negative at worst.
It may be very effective at costing Sony money, maybe even millions. Sony will then turn around and blame the losses on piracy.
"No I don't, and no I won't"
You actually think you can make this claim, and then promise to remain civil in the next paragraph or two? If this guy speaks for you, then I won't debate you, or even better, try for a discourse where the truth is the goal instead of merely winning debate points. I simply won't do it, period. If he doesn't, I'd rather try for a dialog than a debate, but the debate structure is better than nothing if that's what you want. That first point is simply not negotiable - I don't waste time with people who come into the arguement already wanting to slap my face before they've even heard my views.
"Sure we can. Go"
No - that's my condition - I don't debate people who start off by expressing their intent to 'slap me in the face', period. No, I'm not paranoid, Yes I know it's only a metaphorical slap, but still, we can't have a debate because it takes two to tango, and I won't enter into a voluntary relationship with someone who expresses a prexisting desire to harm me. I'm not here to humilate anybody. I don't want to make the people who think ID can't be put on a scientific footing all look like fools, or grind them down, or get a bunch of people who don't really understand the issues to clap harder for my side and call that "winning", or any of that sort of thing. I'm not here to make YOU personally look bad either, nor to quote back (or misquote) what you say in an effort to convince all Slashdom that I won some intangible point here. I might be interested in proving you are wrong on some points, if in fact you are, but I see no reason to try to prove you didn't think, racinate, and judge, gather facts and engage in careful consideration, or otherwise do what all humans do at their best. You may be wrong, but very smart people have been wrong before, and very decent, honorable, and dedicated people have been wrong as well.
You can swear you won't personally stoop to threatening me all you want, but what real difference does that make, if you then turn around and get quotes and references to bolster your arguements from people who do want to slap somebody's face, and never even notice that's where you are getting them from? I don't even mind if you quote some of them, but I do want the right to point out when other statements might show they are arguing from an emotional dislike and not an interest in the truth. Sure, some of what they say may be facts I really should consider, but practically speaking, why should I wade through the added abuse? People who sincerely want to convince me I'm wrong just might have my own interests at heart (at least 1 time in 10), but people who equate reasoned debate with force, getting even, getting one up, or revenge simply never do.
You really can't get around it. If you are of this professor's persuasion on the issue of slapping people's faces, I won't waste my time debating you further. Yes, you do have to account for how your opinions overlap or differ with the professor, at least to me, and on this sole point of motive. Refuse to do so, and I, (doubtless due to my persecution complex), won't go any further. I'm not asking you to account to everyone else on Slashdot, or in Kansas, or whatever, that's up to you and them.
Again, it takes two to make a dialog. I say what he has done has made me less willing to engage in that dialog, without additional assurances. It really doen't matter if it has made you less willing too, or not, as in a voluntary situation, it only takes one party to become reluctant. If you don't care what I think, that reluctance shouldn't matter, but alternately, if it doesn't matter, then you don't care what I think, so why discuss anything. I point out you have asked for no less than four such assurances, while I have asked for only one. Can you honestly claim that none of those four conditions was motivated in any part by any actions of other persons on the pro ID side of the debate? You want me to promise I'm not representing a whole h
I'd actually forgotten that Hatch is ahead of me whichever box I pick. Scary!
It stops being a persecution complex when the person who disagrees with you expresses a personal desire to slap you in the face (assuming they have any actual power to act against you). The "fundies" will milk this sort of behavior for all its worth (and Pat Robertson will doubtless milk it for far more), and if you want to speak out against their opinions, you will find you need to distance yourself from people whose moves are "unnecessarily antagonistic", or your ship will go down with theirs.
Personally, I'd debate some of your opinions on the actual topic of ID, but we're both too busy now discussing this meta-topic of what tactics are fair to use in that debate, so we can't (This professor has thus harmed you as well as me by making us waste more time on peripheral issues and leave the main topic we'd probably both prefer to address.), and since I dcount myself pretty far from a "fundie" as well, he hasn't apologised to either of us. He should have had to apologise to all people on any side of an issue that were willing to have a reasonable and fair minded dialogue on anything.
If (just for the sake of arguement), I want to check box number 5, who do I have to get in line behind?
Yeah, it's amazing how many people in this thread have said "This is like X, and you can't sue over/prosecute/get a court order over X", but for most of their X's, the fact is, people can and do. Far from every organization that claims common carrier status as a defense wins in court, for just one example. The law is full of cases where a claim designed to limit liability actually didn't.
Analogies are slippery things at best, but when the conclusion claimed from them is itself definitely false, there goes any remaining value.
It's like making stone soup. Everyone knows only Shriners can make stone soup in Delaware. No, it's like Wikipedia is like a plasma bank, and John Seigerwhatzis is like Dracula, and since dead people can't sue we should all grab soda straws and...
Haven't any more than a guess. Do I count the cases involving food prep people who worked illegally in the industry while having Hep C or do I assume all employees really washed their hands like the sign says they must, AND that following the sign was sufficient? If I assume some of those employees didn't follow the rules OR that the law they violated was a good law, then the answer is, "At least some, maybe 20-50,000 or so nationwide over the last 10 years, but that's just a first approximation, and I'd be quite happy to find out it's lower".
The larger point is still, it is not enough to design a toilet or urinal that is more ecologically sound if you don't also take into account the new design's effect on the spread of infectious diseases, and it's not enough to ensure that a design is safe if used according to directions unless you also look at what can go wrong if the directions aren't followed.
The spray from existing flush designs is a health risk (moderate rather than major, but still a risk). We need designs that don't waste water AND reduce that risk. We could also use education campaigns to get more people to bother with cleaning the things more often and such, but that's a seperate issue.
Here's a quote re: The Fundamentals of Extremism, from its publisher:
"Ms. Blaker, an ardent supporter of the separation of church and state and a syndicated journalist and writer (see The Wall(TM)), worked with five experts on Christian fundamentalism: Edwin Frederick Kagin, an attorney and founder of Camp Quest, a summer camp for children of atheists and freethinkers; Bobbie Kirkhart, a retired teacher and social worker with abused children and President of Atheist Alliance International; John Suarez, a former professor of psychiatry and a member of the Board of Trustees for Americans United for Separation of Church and State; Herb Silverman, a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and National Board Member of the American Humanist Association; and Edward M. Buckner, Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
If you want to talk about poor sources, here's a site that agrees mostly with you, also one of the very top hits from Google:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
1. It's interesting that this site too admits at one point that data for Louisiana is lacking, and again lists the most fundamentalist states without including Louisiana.
2. The site has a marvelous quote from Ron Barrier "The Spokespersonn (sic) for American Atheists" about why atheists do better than fundamentalists at keeping marriages together. The quote is right under a table that shows the highest divorce rate is not for fundamentalists, but for Jews, which is generally not what most of us would consider a fundmentalist sect. The 3% difference between Jews (30% divorces, by this source) and "Born Again Christians" (27%) and the similar sized difference between "Born again" and "Other" Christians (24%) are both treated as irrelevant and not needing explanation or indicating any ethical or moral superiority one way or the other. The similar 3% difference between "Other Christians and Atheists (21%) is (according to Ron) proof of "Atheist ethical superiority". Oh, just incidentally, this Ron Barrier is one of the authors of several of those 900 scholarly works you mentioned, and the organization sponsoring this link is apparently in the book too.
In the section about regional differences, a table featuring the higher divorce rates in the south is followed by text putting Arizona in the southern region, and Nevada and Oklahoma in the bible belt. The whole site again specifically skips over Cal, but fails to admit it. Ooops, the preparers of this site are using the same sources quoted in your Book. Far from having done their own research, they all seem to be working starting from the exact same government studies...
You might want to Google for good ole' Ron and Bobbie together or other such combinations (Ron hangs around with Ed a lot too)(The photos of them standing side by side on the dias at the awards ceremony together are especially nice). The authors you cite, and the authors of the 900 other scolarly works they cited in turn, mostly appear to comprise a small overlapping pool of people the rest of us would call militant atheists, and just from half an hour or so on the net, I've found several cases where they have been disingenious with the facts, made mistakes in their use of statistical methods and scientific terms, and otherwise shown that their bias is strongly influencing what should be an objective issue. I don't have time to trace every one of those 900 works to show whether they come from such sloppy sources or not. I'm sure you can skip over the top 10 or 20 net sites, pick some search terms, and find some that aren't such poor sources, and you can similarly argue your conclusions entirely from print sources if you choose, but I'm not willing to buy all those scholarly works and cross check, especially since I turned up things that seem to indicate major flaws in this work on the first, second, and now third sites Google gave me looking for a straight forward search term like US Divorce Rate.
So yes, based on what I have seen so far, your source is wrong, yep.
Before deciding that refusing to take responsibility is epidemic, let's look at the streetlight accident at the Thanksgiving parade. The two women had what turned out to be relatively minor injuries. The parade organizers have covered the real medical expenses, and offered to give the women seats in the reviewing stand next year. The women have said publicly that they have no intention of sueing, and think the parade organizers are generally swell people, and they are very grateful for those nice seats, etc. Just about everyone agrees that there were safety precautions in effect, and they were mostly well thought out, that the crews got good training, and so on. The crew is still saying that maybe they could have tried harder, and they'll be even carefuller next year. There supervisors are saying they will look for additional safety methods anyway. The news media generally avoided sensationalizing the accident, and a couple of them have still appologized if anyone got the impression it was more serious than it actually was. There were a couple of news outlets that came off as looking for someone in particular to blame - If anyone takes soft guy's suggestion, they might start with the ones that seemed eager to point fingers before all the facts were in. You just don't hear nearly as much about these common sorts of resolutions as the ones considered hot news.
It has been shown that the divorce rate among the most fundamentalist christians is TWICE that of the divorce rate among atheists and agnostics - and that the divorce rate between the two is pretty much linearly related to the level of fundamentalism the couple is involved in.
... given the latest Monthly Vital Statistics Report .
What's the marriage rate compared between the two groups? Are fundies getting divorced more often because they are more likely to get married in the first place?
I'd doubt this on other grounds as well:
Here's the first hit Google gives for the terms: US Divorce Rate
http://www.divorcereform.org/rates.html
Here's some of the interesting parts:
The last-reported U.S. divorce rate for a calendar year, available as of May, 2005, is 0.38% divorces per capita per year,
Notes on understanding this per capita rate:
* This rate is only for the states that keep track of the number of divorces.
California, Colorado, Indiana and Louisiana do not.
* Since every divorce involves two people, the percentage becomes somewhat more meaningful if you double it. E.g., 0.74% of the entire population gets divorced every year.
* A rate per married people, instead of per straight population, would
be even more helpful, but we do not know of a consistent source for that number. If you do, please tell us.
So California (a state generally on the low end in terms of fundamentalists, one which had progressive divorce laws earlier than any other state and is still generally considered to have some of the most liberal (in the standard not the right-wing sense) divorce laws today, and the state with the most population of all, doesn't keep track of the needed data. That's a transcendentally huge source of error right there. Louisiana, one of the states that has the highest portion of self described fundamentalists, doesn't either, but at least they don't have 35.9 million people.
From the last note, the official rates also don't consistently collate to how many people were ever officially married so they could officially divorce. Dachannien's first closing question is presumably unanswerable without that data, which means the second question can't be answered either.
There is absolutely nothing anyone can say that can't be made absurd by taking it in your own mind to rediculous lengths the original utterer never even implied, and then asking the sort of questions you've chosen. With this method any pro-death penalty arguement can be shot down with a quick "So I suppose you're for hanging litterers then?". Any anti-death penalty arguement can equally be shot down with "So we just let murderers and rapists go free then?".
There is not one, single thing you yourself can positively assert that isn't subject to this sort of undercutting, and you are using a weapon that, if its fair to use it here, makes every single opinion you yourself hold automatically foolish in turn when it's used on you.
Your approach is why lawyers write 300 page contracts that spell out every last detail of what we aren't allowed to do with software - because some fool says "But what if I use a hex editor - it isn't decompiling it if I don't use a complier backwards, is it? So we get 30 synonyms for reverse engineering in one EULA.
There's such a thing as shedding more light on a subject, and there's creating a smoke cloud instead. You're trying for a nasty black cloud here - does the mere thought the 10 commandments might be genuinely divinely inspired scare you that much? (Yes, I just stooped to somewhere still well above your level, and it's still admittedly a cheap shot.)
I Agree that working 60+ steadily is foolish. Any firm that runs on a regular supply and demand basis and can't find full time people enough to divide the work into 40 Hour parcels has problems entirely of its own making, and that sounds like a firm that is going to pass on many of those problems to employees. On the other hand there are some firms where those problems are imposed by the very nature of the business model, and not the fault of management. Doing 60+ or even 80+ occasionally for one of these can be a great idea.
For example, take Tax Prep firms. In the US, they all have a really steep peak in workload in late January and another Peak in April, Because just about everyone wants to file as early as possible if they are getting a refund, or as late as possible if they owe. Their coders have to update the software in late november-december, because Congress never finalizes the changes until nearly the first of the new year. There's always a lot of updates needed then, as Congress ALWAYS changes the tax code, and ALWAYS in some ways they haven't discussed publicly until the last moment (This is one of very few circumstances where the word always is clinically accurate and not hyperbole). Between April and November, there's literally no workload at all for 90-95% of the employees.
There are bound to be other businesses with variants on that last problem - i.e. anyone who relies heavily on Federal Law enforcement, OSHA, DOE, or DOD related contracts can expect a huge influx of new rules that affect code in the last month or so of the year. These firms all rely on 60 Hr+ weeks in their respective peak seasons, and often seasonal lay offs the rest of the year. The better ones usually pay worth such conditions too - there's nothing like getting 60 K for 3 months work in an area where the average income is 17 K., and realizing that your toughest decision come May is whether you want to find something else to try and make 100-120 K total or just be a beach bum until next February or so. I know people who hiked the whole Appalachian Trail rather than bother to get a second job that year.
I've already argued why this is wrong with other posters, and you might want to read some of those posts, but this time, I'll take just one disease.
Hepatitus C commonly damages the kidneys enough that it frequently begins to be present in the urine in copious amounts within two weeks or less of initial infection. It is also a very hardy disease, able to tolerate conditions such as low levels of chlorination that will kill many other germs within milliseconds for significant time. You may have a "feeling that's pretty rare", but it's totally unsupported by the facts.
Here's an estimate on just how many people currently have Hep C in the USA alone. That C. Everett Koop guy may look familiar.
http://www.epidemic.org/theFacts/theEpidemic/
Once you've absorbed the part about 5 Million cases, you might want to check out the rest of the site.
This is also one of over a dozen such conditions where blood is frequently not visible, so you're giving bad medical advice there as well.
"unless there's something kind of wrong with you" is effectively slang for type two Diabetes in this case. Given that there are estimated to be upwards of a million undiagnosed borderline type two diabetics in the US today, what's your point? Your "there shouldn't be" has over a million exceptions just from that problem alone. When you include that the standard test is only reliable if taken at least an hour after eating, and almost all clinically normal people will show significant glucose if they urinate within 15 minutes of drinking a typical large fast food restaurant soda, that ups the numbers to 10's of millions on a typical day. So the original poster was right, this is an extremely significant factor in design.
Ouch, sorry about the missed tag there. That's supposed to be an aren't, and there's a couple of carriage returns or equivalents that aren't needed to parse the sentence. My profound appologies. If I wasn't so sleepy from all the Thanksgiving Triptophan that wasn't really in my turkey in sufficient amounts to explain it, I'd think of a good explanation.
- n't
being brought up in this discussion (until now). We are taxpayers - here only to contribute to their goals and move on.What's frightening is that I can do the substitution above so easily.
The combination of the two is an ongoing reality. There are profound similarities between the loss of power and autonomy the average person is suffering from being treated as just a consumer by businesses and the losses that come from being just the arbitrary recipient of revokable granted rights by the government. Just because businesses, by themselves, can't implement Gulags, doesn't mean the real consequences of the consumerist attitude aren't enormously harmful.
You've just done a very good job of reducing several paragraphs from the article to a nice, simple form without oversimplifying them. Your last clause, clarifying that the results have to be right, not just in the aggregate, but seperately, for this research to be significant, is an especially good example of how not to oversimplify a scientific subject.
One more pedantic point though - I've never liked the use of the word 'collapse' in the Copenhagen interpretation. It has a certain negative connotation re. the post quantum state, like things fall down into existence from some superior state above existence. It seems to prejudice the arguement, by implying that probabilities become discrete things by comeing forth from a sort of Numenon, or Platonic Ideal, or maybe the literal Mind of God. While personally, I actually prefer that interpretation, it's only fair to recognize the alternatives for all the Non-theists out there. Since you show a very good grasp of the subject, I urge you to look at more neutral words such as 'Reification', which is admittedly an uncommon word, but which I personally think is a much better word for most QM discussions, because it doesn't shift the area of discourse into abstract philosophy nearly so much. Please don't take this as critical of your post, which is overall, one of a mere dozen or so responses in this thread that have focussed mostly on the actual science.
"And they bring them to me as a present too!"
Actually they're just wanting you to chop the birds, mice, and rabbits up, marinate them in rich sauces. put them in little cans, and serve them back at the appropraite times. Please, don't ever think a cat feels gratitude. (Writing this post was interrupted by Socks and Frosty wanting more turkey and cheese, "Me-NOW, DAMMIT!".).
Which is why I use the wires up chocobos butts browser and have them pantomime the internet to me.