There are at least two psychotropic drugs which are potent in 100 microgram quantities or less. One of them is LSD. The other one that has any record of abuse at all is little known, so I think I'll leave it that way and not encourage something that may be stupid spreading.
I've always wondered if the usual urine test for LSD is really effective. Supposedly, about 10% of the time a lab tests for Pot and Opiates, the third test in the standard tripletest kit is for LSD. If the lab is testing for something in thousands or tens of thousands of times smaller quantities than THC or opiates, would you really bet that could be done cheaply enough to make it part of the 100 bucks a kit standard tests and still be even vaguely reliable? I wonder how much it cost the Germans to test for Cocaine in such small concentrations?
Neither one refers to anything that can be rigorously defined or precisely measured (although the AKC gets closer to having some real standards than human racialists, they haven't kept one uniform standard for nearly enough doggy generations to claim it's meaningful from a genetic POV). In a sense, any words that don't have defined referents are synonymous. There are some definitions of Species, Genus, Phylum, Clade, and other biological terms that are useful for actually making a scientific prediction, but race and breed are not generally among such terms.
One of the fundamental principles of Natural Selection is that produces a locally optimal organism. It doesn't aim at long term perfection. This is why, for example, blood vessels are found on the inner surface of the eye where they block some photo-receptors and reduce the overall surface available for light gathering. Nature couldn't plan ahead, couldn't say in effect "Later, when this eye is more advanced, I shall want the blood supply for vertebrates to come in from the back where it won't be in the way". It went for immediate utility, selecting each mutation for what it could improve then, not for what might be a better design many generations later. In fact, Nature doesn't 'aim' at all. Human choice includes the ability to plan long term and aim at a goal with other than immediate utility. That is most specifically NOT what Natural Selection does.
Or are you actually arguing that the only antonym to natural is supernatural, and that artificial is not a word?
"No scientists has ever claimed that evolution, as the mechanism for diversity on this planet, precludes the idea of a creator."
Richard Dawkins has has most certainly claimed that - The very front cover of his book "The Blind Watchmaker" is subtitled "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design".
Just in the preface, he makes these statements. "I could not imagine being an Atheist before 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species was published." "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Atheist.".
And if it didn't prove anything about the existence of God, one way or the other, then you wouldn't be fine with it, right? How about being fine with it because it's true, regardless of what else it proves or doesn't prove?
I can design a plastic coat hanger with a textured surface to keep clothes from slipping off, but if I want it to also be strong enough to support a 747, I don't think I could design in that feature, so ergo by your definition I can't really design ANYTHING. Humans made decisions on which features they wanted in a poodle or whatever, and they used their intelligence, whereas natural selection presumably doesn't have any intelligence. Just because their intelligence didn't extend to knowing all the options and consequences in advance and being able to implement any desired change doesn't mean it was non-existent. I think your sig really sums it up.
That's one of my problems with the side I actually favor more in this debate. There's some great evidence for evolution and I'm personally comfortable with it, but the scientific community doesn't always fairly explicate the quality of its evidence, and it's not just that the creationists (and particularly the young earth faction) don't want to hear the truth, Plenty do, but they are hearing what they recognize as BS. and that turns them off.
I would love to see a popular book on Dinosaurs, for example, that goes accurately into how many fossils of a given species we have found and how many are complete. When you actually read further than the popularizations, you find there are some species we have hundreds or even thousands of fossils for, and where we have complete specimens of many different ages and both sexes. The diagram in a popular work that shows, for example, how such a species ranged over parts of Wyoming and the Dakotas may be pretty accurate. But three pages later, the same book will show a range diagram for another Dinosaur, and it turns out there are only two partially complete fossils of it, both elderly females, both missing their entire back halves. That second diagram is wildly speculative, but it will be shown as though there is as much authority for its accuracy as the first.
Often, the accompanying illustration, for such a case, shows a breeding pair and young with various skin textures, colorations, and such, and shows what purports to be a typical number of offspring, and the herd that they are a part of can be seen in the distance, some of them munching on the plants they supposedly preferred. This can all end up incredibly false to fact. To the typical layman, the connection between Dinos and evolution is very evident. There's more chance they've seen the word Evolution in a Dino book than anywhere else. BS them there, and you are BSing about Evolution.
The scientists named Oviraptor for its assumed feeding behavior (Egg Eater), then it turned out when they found more fossils the creature's anatomical features really indicate it harvested clams in shallow water, and the eggs found early on were actually its own eggs. (This too is an opinion, but its at least based on a lot more fossils and testing than the old one, and I suspect it will stand the test of time where the old theory didn't). Leaving a species known to be so misleadingly named in modern texts, or drawing the second species range diagram in solid colors just like the first, looks like deliberate lying to those 'young earth creationists'.
The same problem also comes up with nature documentaries and even shows and books about human genetics. As just one point, how many shows on human ancestry have talked about two factors - African Origin and The Ice Ages, in such a way as to imply that the part of the species that stayed home in Africa and wasn't toughened up by all those Ice Ages is archaic and primitive.
Instead of 'admitting' that we have far more evidence for some facts than for others, and that not all evidence is equally good, the Biology community has tended to take the hard line. A more speculative theory about, say, Dinosaurs in general having feathers, gets treated as though challenging it challenges the whole edifice of Evolution. Special factors, such as super powerful sexually based selection pressure, are used to keep the whole theory seeming rock solid, instead of correctly saying what Science can honestly defend - i.e. "We don't know if sex based selection explains all cases where one gender is bigger than the other or not, and there's lots of work to be done, but that doesn't really mean much about the overall theory of Evolution one way or another.".
Not all the people who reject Evolution are immune to rational convincing - but a lot of them are unwilling to listen where there is no humility or proportion, so they end up listening to the people they think have such virtues, at least until they are disillusioned. Plenty of them are by now, and some of them will listen.
But try a gedanken experiment here. Lets shoot all the dogs that aren't pure bred Mastiffs or pure bred Chihuahuas, and leave just the two groups, with exactly the genes they have now. Do they become two separate species because they can't naturally interbreed in the wild, or only if they couldn't crossbreed without human intervention, or what? You could imagine variations such as raising two different breeds on different islands for a few generations and letting them naturally diverge more if this makes it clearer. What are we defining as a species if the presence or absence of another species (humans in this case) determines whether another species (two types, supposedly both dogs) is really one species or two separate ones.
Normally, we define species by whether the members can interbreed, not by other tests such as your idea that one member of the species recognizes the other as the same species. It's an interesting idea, and maybe we could even uses a simple term for it, but it's not the idea Biologists use. Nowadays, we assume the test for interbreeding is combining genes and getting offspring that can keep on reproducing for more generations. We don't count getting sterile offspring (Hence Horses and Donkeys are separate species. They reproduce together for one generation, but the resulting Mule is sterile. Presumably, Donkeys 'recognize Horses as the same species' when they mate, they are just wrong on that point.). Can the Mastiff and the Chihuahua reproduce for long enough term or just for a single generation? And what about one way operations? You may still be able to breed a female Mastiff with a male Chihuahua with human assistance, but what about the reverse? (Eeuucch!).
The smallpox and gunpowder I'll give you, but I doubt that the horses killed millions, unless you mean they helped white guys chase the Native Americans down so they could be shot more easily. Might as well blame tarring ship hulls so bigger boats could transport the white guys over the Atlantic,
The point is, the perchlorates already in Martian soil are oxidizers. They do provide plenty of free Oxygen when they are heated, and so yes, what happens to the organic compounds being heated with them IS oxidation. The scientists are using burn up in its normal sense.
I live in the part of Tennessee that tried to avoid secession and stay with the north. My whole state was readmitted to the Union a year ahead of anyone else because roughly a third of it regarded it as though they had never left. There were whole counties that passed resolutions to stay with the federal government, and one which didn't apply for readmission to the state of Tenn until 40 years later after they were "sure it was going to stay loyal this time". Nearby is West Virginia, which actually formed a new state to stick with the Union. For some reason that totally escapes me, there are large numbers of people in both areas that still display rebel flags and talk about how the South's gonna rise again. Their own ancestors very often fought for the north, and it's actually very common if you help one of them trace his family tree to find that 'great, great, grandpa' was a Union soldier. If you find out why those people in Japan are acting that way, maybe you could could work on this next.
You've raised some exceptionally well read points about various religions opinions on slavery. I'd add that blanket claims that Buddhism supported slavery or even other things we consider backward (i.e. a caste system) don't really encompass branches such as Tibetian Buddhism and certainly not Zen. Muslim religion deserves to be judged in part by the Sufis as well as the Wahabi-ists (that's probably not a word, as spelled, but I hope it's close enough to convey the idea). The Muslim faith also can take some real pride in the way civilization developed under it during its first 300 years or so, to somewhat offset any dragging its feet during the last few.
I think you could broaden the term "metaphysical quasi religions" to include philosophies in general, and in a sense, religions are just a subset of philosophies. When it comes to opinions, there's always somebody willing to stifle everyone else's. Even a solidly materialist philosophy such as Capitalism has people who act like they literally believe in a giant invisible hand, and make sacrifices to it.
I don't really agree with "generally the pro-slavery people who were seen as have the strict biblical view, and the anti-slavery people who were seen as representing a more liberal, progressive, interpretative version of Christianity." though (although the liberal and progressive terms are probably fair enough). I certainly think the pro-slavery factions saw themselves as being, overall, more literalist, but the writings of abolitionists such as Garrison, and even generalist authors such as Twain were often critical of that claim. While the pro-slavery people may have claimed in general to be strictly non-interpretive, just as most evangelical Christians do today, to the admittedly limited extent it's objectifiable, I don't think it's a legitimate claim.
People outside those branches of the faith at the time, by and large, didn't see the pro-slavery side as doing less interpreting either. It's a matter of serious interpretation just to claim that the OT book Leviticus applies to anyone besides the tribe of Levi, as even the title shows. It takes a great deal of interpretation to claim the KJV translation is superior to all others, and even more to claim it is somehow superior to the original Hebrew and Greek in a culture where a lot of the educated class spoke both languages. Reading the incredible distortions of logic needed to make "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" justify a rebellion against the local 'Caesar' of the U.S. Government shows just how interpretive things got on the part of the supposedly strict no interpretation needed factions.
Exactly like every MD would rather be working in medicine than in construction or fast food, so they accept lower salaries. And all those people who work sanitation get paid extra to offset how they would rather be working construction. Yes it's basic economics.
If basic economics really worked the way you think, there would still be four brain dead zombies out there who modded you insightful, but none of them would be making over two dollars an hour.
Green or green with yellow aren't auto neutral in communications. Try old 108 pair phone. Any pair or combination can have a constant 24 volts AC between them even if hooked up correctly as far as the outside of the building. If they are carrying pre DTMF era signal sources (like rotary dial phones), ringer current can be 70 volts (on really old gear, this is likely to be AC, but not at anywhere near 60 Hz, depending on how fast someone cranks the little handcrank. 120 Hz. will sometimes go into tissue when 30 Hz. would mostly run across the skin.). And if you get one like I did once, some jerk will be running 440 volts DC on one pair (which just happened to be the green with yellow/yellow with green pair). Not that there can be a lot of sustained amperage on wires that small, but since I was knee deep in mud and miles from medical support, that might not have mattered.
All this stuff is still in use. I've actually been in that situation from the movie "The Abyss", where I needed to tell a yellow and white wire from a solid white one under dim yellow lighting.
So when I'm working power and not signal, there's one rule: red is hot, black is hot, white is hot, green is hot, any other funky colors in the box are probably hotter, and some joker probably routed the whole mess right across 8,500 V. high tension. Assume your significant other just took out a million dollar insurance policy on you, and is sleeping with whoever hooked up the system you are working, and he/she is better in bed than you are.
The whole "Money is the root of all evil" routine is a (mis)quotation of the Bible, not some 'leftist' book. So I guess the original poster is saying that Christians are all Leftists, and the Right is where the Atheists stay.
When somebody makes a claim that is totally absurd, on the level of "Getting a college education means you have 83 times the chance of being on welfare as a high school dropout does", or "Learning to read causes women's bust size to get smaller so they become old maids", they are a troll. This applies even if you have to work out the claim from a big stack of rambling nonsense. Please don't feed the trolls.
I strongly suspect the original poster is thinking of a grand jury's job to determine whether evidence is sufficient to justify prosecution, so he has a point. In this case, the judge is looking much more at questions of law and not so much at questions of fact. Nobody (to my admittedly limited knowledge), is claiming that its not a fact sex industry people are advertising on Craigslist. There may be some legitimate issues over how many, what portion of the services advertised actually count as prostitution, what steps Craigslist is taking and other such facts, but what the judge is dealing with is a matter of what the law itself says, not the specific facts. (And yes, that's appropriate for a judge).
I think you are absolutely right about their being an increasingly large faction that believes they are immune. I think you are wrong about their belief being mostly correct. Kill a few tens of thousands and anonymizing proxies and tor nodes won't do a damned thing to protect anybody. Do that to a major nation state, and the host government will soon be asked why it has committed an act of war. The way, the ONLY way, to prove they didn't will be to publicly display the 'irresponsible folks' heads on spikes along with evidence they caught all of them. No service provider is going to turn a blind eye to their own nations military delivering a court order via RPGS and 125 mm cannon rounds if necessary. I can't imagine one that wouldn't reveal all information instantly to a squad level force armed with mere assault rifles. Once their own government has revealed their intent to use lethal force, do you see anyone still clinging to the delusion they will be protected by an ISP?
Really, we out to be concerned about how to keep machines from imposing ANY conditions on us we don't want. It's not just extinction issues, but should we be concerned AI machines will limit our freedoms in some way? Could they 'deflect' our society from achieving its full potential? To argue this, we would need to figure out what kind of society we want to be, and only then could we intelligently debate what role AI should play, if any. If we don't know what we want to be when we grow up, that's our problem, even if it ultimately indirectly causes human extinction.
Actually, I kinda like the thought of having a dog sized spider running around my home. Even better, make it still obviously robotic, maybe with chromed legs and parts of the shell finished in baked on powder enamel and clearcoat, and give it a mouth area that's obviously just for whatever it does and not for sucking fluid from prey, and I suspect most people won't freak too much. People react to spiders the way they do largely because some of them are venomous and attack from concealment, not because they have eight legs.
I'm actually more uncomfortable with human look alikes. Sufficiently human looking robots gain real advantages as assassins and sex toys. A genuinely human level AI can technically choose to desire any appearance we can construct and I believe it has an ethical right to do so, but I don't want non-self aware human impersonators loose. There's something seriously wrong to me about a non-self aware entity being shaped to mimic a normally self aware one.
This is an example of Weird Tech. Spectacular examples of Weird Tech are found on the Mt. Palomar 200 inch telescope and the original Lear jets.
For Palomar, its seen in the analog computing device that consists of hundreds of cables, cams and weights that balance the scope's steering gear. These are individually made as non-identical assemblies. In the basement there sits a drum of special oil for these parts. It is now more than half empty. The one time the maintenance crew tried to use some other lubricant, the system failed miserable until that was all stripped off and replaced with the 'right' oil. Nobody wrote down the formula for the stuff in the drum, it could be half Marvel mystery oil and half Bob's #3 special hair tonic for all anyone now alive knows. It's probably a cheap, out of the box solution though, not some special formulation, just something of which we have lost track.
For Lear, a lot of the jet's navigation and control is again analog devices, but his cables and mechanisms move across bearing surfaces that are often precisely calculated hyperbolic elliptical curves, interlaced helices, or similarly funky looking bits that would not look out of place in a museum of modern art.
Your shower hose is a small example of the same sort, a cheap solution that works better than any of the more sophisticated ones available - cherish it.
Aren't disposal fees, for example the tax that the state of California imposes on some electronics, to cover the costs of scrapping them, already an example of this?
I'm sitting at a desk made during WW2 as I type this. It's made of thicker steel than most still running cars. I kept three 21 inch CRT monitors on top of it for a time before I went to lighter gear. Before I bought it from them, it stood up to 35 years at a DOE plant. All drawers, leveling casters and such work. There are some pretty intricate mechanisms to let spring loaded typing shelves and such lock in place and so a single key can lock all the drawers with a serious throw-bolt system. When I bought it it happened to be the one from the bottom of a stack eight high, so it was supporting about 550 lbs. (No, I didn't make them give me the one on the bottom, I bid on the seven drawer model and the forklift operator pulled the first one he saw.). There's little survival selection involved, as they must have still had 5,000 of them in the warehouses, and a heaping lot of them are still in service with DOE.
I don't know if I'd say most. I greatly admire the sheriff in Illinois who has insisted banks follow all the regulations they are required to by law before he will assist in evictions and foreclosures. He's a good cop, and a courageous one to stand up to the DA and others who were urging him to let it go, but I was disappointed there weren't a hundred more like him coming forward nationwide. When we see a few hundred more like him and Sheriff Dale Williams, we can say most.
He didn't say "any two or more people who pool their financial interests", that could be a partnership or some other entity. A corporation has other features besides that one, and I greatly suspect he was referring to those other features. He didn't advocate killing any of the physical persons who found corporations either, rather he advocated 'killing' the corporations themselves. You just set up a straw man and attacked it. (And some fool gave you a mod point for it - well played, sir!).
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There are at least two psychotropic drugs which are potent in 100 microgram quantities or less. One of them is LSD. The other one that has any record of abuse at all is little known, so I think I'll leave it that way and not encourage something that may be stupid spreading.
I've always wondered if the usual urine test for LSD is really effective. Supposedly, about 10% of the time a lab tests for Pot and Opiates, the third test in the standard tripletest kit is for LSD. If the lab is testing for something in thousands or tens of thousands of times smaller quantities than THC or opiates, would you really bet that could be done cheaply enough to make it part of the 100 bucks a kit standard tests and still be even vaguely reliable? I wonder how much it cost the Germans to test for Cocaine in such small concentrations?
Neither one refers to anything that can be rigorously defined or precisely measured (although the AKC gets closer to having some real standards than human racialists, they haven't kept one uniform standard for nearly enough doggy generations to claim it's meaningful from a genetic POV). In a sense, any words that don't have defined referents are synonymous. There are some definitions of Species, Genus, Phylum, Clade, and other biological terms that are useful for actually making a scientific prediction, but race and breed are not generally among such terms.
One of the fundamental principles of Natural Selection is that produces a locally optimal organism. It doesn't aim at long term perfection. This is why, for example, blood vessels are found on the inner surface of the eye where they block some photo-receptors and reduce the overall surface available for light gathering. Nature couldn't plan ahead, couldn't say in effect "Later, when this eye is more advanced, I shall want the blood supply for vertebrates to come in from the back where it won't be in the way". It went for immediate utility, selecting each mutation for what it could improve then, not for what might be a better design many generations later. In fact, Nature doesn't 'aim' at all. Human choice includes the ability to plan long term and aim at a goal with other than immediate utility. That is most specifically NOT what Natural Selection does.
Or are you actually arguing that the only antonym to natural is supernatural, and that artificial is not a word?
"No scientists has ever claimed that evolution, as the mechanism for diversity on this planet, precludes the idea of a creator."
Richard Dawkins has has most certainly claimed that - The very front cover of his book "The Blind Watchmaker" is subtitled "Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design".
Just in the preface, he makes these statements. "I could not imagine being an Atheist before 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species was published." "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Atheist.".
And if it didn't prove anything about the existence of God, one way or the other, then you wouldn't be fine with it, right? How about being fine with it because it's true, regardless of what else it proves or doesn't prove?
I can design a plastic coat hanger with a textured surface to keep clothes from slipping off, but if I want it to also be strong enough to support a 747, I don't think I could design in that feature, so ergo by your definition I can't really design ANYTHING. Humans made decisions on which features they wanted in a poodle or whatever, and they used their intelligence, whereas natural selection presumably doesn't have any intelligence. Just because their intelligence didn't extend to knowing all the options and consequences in advance and being able to implement any desired change doesn't mean it was non-existent. I think your sig really sums it up.
That's one of my problems with the side I actually favor more in this debate. There's some great evidence for evolution and I'm personally comfortable with it, but the scientific community doesn't always fairly explicate the quality of its evidence, and it's not just that the creationists (and particularly the young earth faction) don't want to hear the truth, Plenty do, but they are hearing what they recognize as BS. and that turns them off.
I would love to see a popular book on Dinosaurs, for example, that goes accurately into how many fossils of a given species we have found and how many are complete. When you actually read further than the popularizations, you find there are some species we have hundreds or even thousands of fossils for, and where we have complete specimens of many different ages and both sexes. The diagram in a popular work that shows, for example, how such a species ranged over parts of Wyoming and the Dakotas may be pretty accurate. But three pages later, the same book will show a range diagram for another Dinosaur, and it turns out there are only two partially complete fossils of it, both elderly females, both missing their entire back halves. That second diagram is wildly speculative, but it will be shown as though there is as much authority for its accuracy as the first.
Often, the accompanying illustration, for such a case, shows a breeding pair and young with various skin textures, colorations, and such, and shows what purports to be a typical number of offspring, and the herd that they are a part of can be seen in the distance, some of them munching on the plants they supposedly preferred. This can all end up incredibly false to fact. To the typical layman, the connection between Dinos and evolution is very evident. There's more chance they've seen the word Evolution in a Dino book than anywhere else. BS them there, and you are BSing about Evolution.
The scientists named Oviraptor for its assumed feeding behavior (Egg Eater), then it turned out when they found more fossils the creature's anatomical features really indicate it harvested clams in shallow water, and the eggs found early on were actually its own eggs. (This too is an opinion, but its at least based on a lot more fossils and testing than the old one, and I suspect it will stand the test of time where the old theory didn't). Leaving a species known to be so misleadingly named in modern texts, or drawing the second species range diagram in solid colors just like the first, looks like deliberate lying to those 'young earth creationists'.
The same problem also comes up with nature documentaries and even shows and books about human genetics. As just one point, how many shows on human ancestry have talked about two factors - African Origin and The Ice Ages, in such a way as to imply that the part of the species that stayed home in Africa and wasn't toughened up by all those Ice Ages is archaic and primitive.
Instead of 'admitting' that we have far more evidence for some facts than for others, and that not all evidence is equally good, the Biology community has tended to take the hard line. A more speculative theory about, say, Dinosaurs in general having feathers, gets treated as though challenging it challenges the whole edifice of Evolution. Special factors, such as super powerful sexually based selection pressure, are used to keep the whole theory seeming rock solid, instead of correctly saying what Science can honestly defend - i.e. "We don't know if sex based selection explains all cases where one gender is bigger than the other or not, and there's lots of work to be done, but that doesn't really mean much about the overall theory of Evolution one way or another.".
Not all the people who reject Evolution are immune to rational convincing - but a lot of them are unwilling to listen where there is no humility or proportion, so they end up listening to the people they think have such virtues, at least until they are disillusioned. Plenty of them are by now, and some of them will listen.
But try a gedanken experiment here. Lets shoot all the dogs that aren't pure bred Mastiffs or pure bred Chihuahuas, and leave just the two groups, with exactly the genes they have now. Do they become two separate species because they can't naturally interbreed in the wild, or only if they couldn't crossbreed without human intervention, or what? You could imagine variations such as raising two different breeds on different islands for a few generations and letting them naturally diverge more if this makes it clearer. What are we defining as a species if the presence or absence of another species (humans in this case) determines whether another species (two types, supposedly both dogs) is really one species or two separate ones.
Normally, we define species by whether the members can interbreed, not by other tests such as your idea that one member of the species recognizes the other as the same species. It's an interesting idea, and maybe we could even uses a simple term for it, but it's not the idea Biologists use. Nowadays, we assume the test for interbreeding is combining genes and getting offspring that can keep on reproducing for more generations. We don't count getting sterile offspring (Hence Horses and Donkeys are separate species. They reproduce together for one generation, but the resulting Mule is sterile. Presumably, Donkeys 'recognize Horses as the same species' when they mate, they are just wrong on that point.). Can the Mastiff and the Chihuahua reproduce for long enough term or just for a single generation? And what about one way operations? You may still be able to breed a female Mastiff with a male Chihuahua with human assistance, but what about the reverse? (Eeuucch!).
The smallpox and gunpowder I'll give you, but I doubt that the horses killed millions, unless you mean they helped white guys chase the Native Americans down so they could be shot more easily. Might as well blame tarring ship hulls so bigger boats could transport the white guys over the Atlantic,
The point is, the perchlorates already in Martian soil are oxidizers. They do provide plenty of free Oxygen when they are heated, and so yes, what happens to the organic compounds being heated with them IS oxidation. The scientists are using burn up in its normal sense.
I live in the part of Tennessee that tried to avoid secession and stay with the north. My whole state was readmitted to the Union a year ahead of anyone else because roughly a third of it regarded it as though they had never left. There were whole counties that passed resolutions to stay with the federal government, and one which didn't apply for readmission to the state of Tenn until 40 years later after they were "sure it was going to stay loyal this time". Nearby is West Virginia, which actually formed a new state to stick with the Union. For some reason that totally escapes me, there are large numbers of people in both areas that still display rebel flags and talk about how the South's gonna rise again. Their own ancestors very often fought for the north, and it's actually very common if you help one of them trace his family tree to find that 'great, great, grandpa' was a Union soldier. If you find out why those people in Japan are acting that way, maybe you could could work on this next.
You've raised some exceptionally well read points about various religions opinions on slavery. I'd add that blanket claims that Buddhism supported slavery or even other things we consider backward (i.e. a caste system) don't really encompass branches such as Tibetian Buddhism and certainly not Zen. Muslim religion deserves to be judged in part by the Sufis as well as the Wahabi-ists (that's probably not a word, as spelled, but I hope it's close enough to convey the idea). The Muslim faith also can take some real pride in the way civilization developed under it during its first 300 years or so, to somewhat offset any dragging its feet during the last few.
I think you could broaden the term "metaphysical quasi religions" to include philosophies in general, and in a sense, religions are just a subset of philosophies. When it comes to opinions, there's always somebody willing to stifle everyone else's. Even a solidly materialist philosophy such as Capitalism has people who act like they literally believe in a giant invisible hand, and make sacrifices to it.
I don't really agree with "generally the pro-slavery people who were seen as have the strict biblical view, and the anti-slavery people who were seen as representing a more liberal, progressive, interpretative version of Christianity." though (although the liberal and progressive terms are probably fair enough). I certainly think the pro-slavery factions saw themselves as being, overall, more literalist, but the writings of abolitionists such as Garrison, and even generalist authors such as Twain were often critical of that claim. While the pro-slavery people may have claimed in general to be strictly non-interpretive, just as most evangelical Christians do today, to the admittedly limited extent it's objectifiable, I don't think it's a legitimate claim.
People outside those branches of the faith at the time, by and large, didn't see the pro-slavery side as doing less interpreting either. It's a matter of serious interpretation just to claim that the OT book Leviticus applies to anyone besides the tribe of Levi, as even the title shows. It takes a great deal of interpretation to claim the KJV translation is superior to all others, and even more to claim it is somehow superior to the original Hebrew and Greek in a culture where a lot of the educated class spoke both languages. Reading the incredible distortions of logic needed to make "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" justify a rebellion against the local 'Caesar' of the U.S. Government shows just how interpretive things got on the part of the supposedly strict no interpretation needed factions.
Exactly like every MD would rather be working in medicine than in construction or fast food, so they accept lower salaries. And all those people who work sanitation get paid extra to offset how they would rather be working construction.
Yes it's basic economics.
If basic economics really worked the way you think, there would still be four brain dead zombies out there who modded you insightful, but none of them would be making over two dollars an hour.
Green or green with yellow aren't auto neutral in communications. Try old 108 pair phone. Any pair or combination can have a constant 24 volts AC between them even if hooked up correctly as far as the outside of the building. If they are carrying pre DTMF era signal sources (like rotary dial phones), ringer current can be 70 volts (on really old gear, this is likely to be AC, but not at anywhere near 60 Hz, depending on how fast someone cranks the little handcrank. 120 Hz. will sometimes go into tissue when 30 Hz. would mostly run across the skin.). And if you get one like I did once, some jerk will be running 440 volts DC on one pair (which just happened to be the green with yellow/yellow with green pair). Not that there can be a lot of sustained amperage on wires that small, but since I was knee deep in mud and miles from medical support, that might not have mattered.
All this stuff is still in use. I've actually been in that situation from the movie "The Abyss", where I needed to tell a yellow and white wire from a solid white one under dim yellow lighting.
So when I'm working power and not signal, there's one rule: red is hot, black is hot, white is hot, green is hot, any other funky colors in the box are probably hotter, and some joker probably routed the whole mess right across 8,500 V. high tension. Assume your significant other just took out a million dollar insurance policy on you, and is sleeping with whoever hooked up the system you are working, and he/she is better in bed than you are.
The whole "Money is the root of all evil" routine is a (mis)quotation of the Bible, not some 'leftist' book. So I guess the original poster is saying that Christians are all Leftists, and the Right is where the Atheists stay.
When somebody makes a claim that is totally absurd, on the level of "Getting a college education means you have 83 times the chance of being on welfare as a high school dropout does", or "Learning to read causes women's bust size to get smaller so they become old maids", they are a troll. This applies even if you have to work out the claim from a big stack of rambling nonsense. Please don't feed the trolls.
I strongly suspect the original poster is thinking of a grand jury's job to determine whether evidence is sufficient to justify prosecution, so he has a point. In this case, the judge is looking much more at questions of law and not so much at questions of fact. Nobody (to my admittedly limited knowledge), is claiming that its not a fact sex industry people are advertising on Craigslist. There may be some legitimate issues over how many, what portion of the services advertised actually count as prostitution, what steps Craigslist is taking and other such facts, but what the judge is dealing with is a matter of what the law itself says, not the specific facts. (And yes, that's appropriate for a judge).
I think you are absolutely right about their being an increasingly large faction that believes they are immune. I think you are wrong about their belief being mostly correct. Kill a few tens of thousands and anonymizing proxies and tor nodes won't do a damned thing to protect anybody. Do that to a major nation state, and the host government will soon be asked why it has committed an act of war. The way, the ONLY way, to prove they didn't will be to publicly display the 'irresponsible folks' heads on spikes along with evidence they caught all of them. No service provider is going to turn a blind eye to their own nations military delivering a court order via RPGS and 125 mm cannon rounds if necessary. I can't imagine one that wouldn't reveal all information instantly to a squad level force armed with mere assault rifles. Once their own government has revealed their intent to use lethal force, do you see anyone still clinging to the delusion they will be protected by an ISP?
Actually, most people regularly hanging out in nuke proof shelters ARE highly trained members of the Army, Air Force, Submarine service, etc.
Really, we out to be concerned about how to keep machines from imposing ANY conditions on us we don't want. It's not just extinction issues, but should we be concerned AI machines will limit our freedoms in some way? Could they 'deflect' our society from achieving its full potential? To argue this, we would need to figure out what kind of society we want to be, and only then could we intelligently debate what role AI should play, if any. If we don't know what we want to be when we grow up, that's our problem, even if it ultimately indirectly causes human extinction.
Actually, I kinda like the thought of having a dog sized spider running around my home. Even better, make it still obviously robotic, maybe with chromed legs and parts of the shell finished in baked on powder enamel and clearcoat, and give it a mouth area that's obviously just for whatever it does and not for sucking fluid from prey, and I suspect most people won't freak too much. People react to spiders the way they do largely because some of them are venomous and attack from concealment, not because they have eight legs.
I'm actually more uncomfortable with human look alikes. Sufficiently human looking robots gain real advantages as assassins and sex toys. A genuinely human level AI can technically choose to desire any appearance we can construct and I believe it has an ethical right to do so, but I don't want non-self aware human impersonators loose. There's something seriously wrong to me about a non-self aware entity being shaped to mimic a normally self aware one.
This is an example of Weird Tech. Spectacular examples of Weird Tech are found on the Mt. Palomar 200 inch telescope and the original Lear jets.
For Palomar, its seen in the analog computing device that consists of hundreds of cables, cams and weights that balance the scope's steering gear. These are individually made as non-identical assemblies. In the basement there sits a drum of special oil for these parts. It is now more than half empty. The one time the maintenance crew tried to use some other lubricant, the system failed miserable until that was all stripped off and replaced with the 'right' oil. Nobody wrote down the formula for the stuff in the drum, it could be half Marvel mystery oil and half Bob's #3 special hair tonic for all anyone now alive knows. It's probably a cheap, out of the box solution though, not some special formulation, just something of which we have lost track.
For Lear, a lot of the jet's navigation and control is again analog devices, but his cables and mechanisms move across bearing surfaces that are often precisely calculated hyperbolic elliptical curves, interlaced helices, or similarly funky looking bits that would not look out of place in a museum of modern art.
Your shower hose is a small example of the same sort, a cheap solution that works better than any of the more sophisticated ones available - cherish it.
Aren't disposal fees, for example the tax that the state of California imposes on some electronics, to cover the costs of scrapping them, already an example of this?
I'm sitting at a desk made during WW2 as I type this. It's made of thicker steel than most still running cars. I kept three 21 inch CRT monitors on top of it for a time before I went to lighter gear. Before I bought it from them, it stood up to 35 years at a DOE plant. All drawers, leveling casters and such work. There are some pretty intricate mechanisms to let spring loaded typing shelves and such lock in place and so a single key can lock all the drawers with a serious throw-bolt system. When I bought it it happened to be the one from the bottom of a stack eight high, so it was supporting about 550 lbs. (No, I didn't make them give me the one on the bottom, I bid on the seven drawer model and the forklift operator pulled the first one he saw.). There's little survival selection involved, as they must have still had 5,000 of them in the warehouses, and a heaping lot of them are still in service with DOE.
I don't know if I'd say most. I greatly admire the sheriff in Illinois who has insisted banks follow all the regulations they are required to by law before he will assist in evictions and foreclosures. He's a good cop, and a courageous one to stand up to the DA and others who were urging him to let it go, but I was disappointed there weren't a hundred more like him coming forward nationwide. When we see a few hundred more like him and Sheriff Dale Williams, we can say most.
He didn't say "any two or more people who pool their financial interests", that could be a partnership or some other entity. A corporation has other features besides that one, and I greatly suspect he was referring to those other features. He didn't advocate killing any of the physical persons who found corporations either, rather he advocated 'killing' the corporations themselves. You just set up a straw man and attacked it. (And some fool gave you a mod point for it - well played, sir!).