First off, you are mistaking all atheists for "Darwinian Naturalists". That's just grossly offensive.
In-line with Darwinian principles, I'll ask, "Who cares?" Do you have a reason anyone should care?
Just out of curiosity: what principles are you talking about? Because people caring whether they offend other beings seems to follow logically and obviously from "survival of the fittest" (making enemies makes you and your offspring less likely to survive).
gain, that someone claims to be acting on the principles of the religion does not mean they actually are. Defining a group by the precise opposite of their definitional objectives is not useful for any purpose.
We need to distinguish between two concepts here: what is the common definition of christian (makes noises about Jesus), and who would Jesus consider a genuine follower. Also, you need to understand that the latter is relevant in theology and personal spirituality of christians, while the former is relevant in sociology, which makes it the correct one here. If a bloodthirsty mob led by a firebrand preacher murders an alleged witch the culprits may or may not have stamped their one-way tickets to Hell, but that doesn't change the fact that the murder happened in the name of Christianity, and deserves to be credited on the "religion" side of whatever tabs anyone might be keeping of these things.
In other words, you can't refute critique of religion just by declaring all critique-worthy people "not really religious". They might be, they just don't agree with you on the tenets of your religion. You, them, the both of you, or neither of you might be heretic(s), but that's between you and your god(s) and is certainly not something you could reasonably expect outsiders to know or care about - and thus you shouln't except such an argument to work on them, either.
TL;DR: "Does not mass murder" is not part of the dictionary definition of Christianity or any other religion I know about, so claiming it is is a classic No True Scotsman fallacy.
They said there was no danger in an earthquake prone town full of ancient fragile buildings. They weren't expected to predict an earthquake, they were expected to assess and relay the risk of the area.
Obviously any town full of buildings that are both fragile and ancient isn't very prone to earthquakes. So I'd be inclined to think the "earthquake not probable" prediction was quite correct.
Try calculating the correct value to more decimal points than they did. If that fails, you can probably nail them for not specifying the geometry used. If they did, you can always resort to pointing out that the axioms underlaying their work are unprovable - that's not exactly the same as disproving it, but it's kind of a draw.
What? Did you think that mathematics is somehow immune to bullshit and dishonest "scepticism"? Nothing is.
The ruling basically states that there is a risk and that phones are not totally safe. Use them excessively from a very young age and you are taking a risk. For certain types of cancer at certain locations, it should be a simple an automatic win for the victim and the mobile phone companies need to set up a scheme to pay for those victims.
So basically, it's the Italian equivalent of the McDonald's coffee case - except rather than getting burns from hot coffee, the victim spilled cold coffee on his lap and developed skin cancer a decade later, so it's obviously the coffee.
The last time this case was featured, we got some pretty damn detailed descriptions about how the brave vigilante Zimmerman shot a 100 pounds lighter unarmed criminal in desperate self-defence, or how the helpless kid Martin was brutally murdered by a psychotic racist pursuing him for wearing a hoodie. So, any bets on how this round of defending one's position on an issue one can't possibly have any informed opinion about by making shit up goes?
False. It raises the question. We've been over this.
Yes, we have, and the literal meaning of a phrase is always correct usage, even if a phrase meaning "circular reasoning" in a foreign language was also translated as it once upon a time.
If this is true, then what about the abilities of magnets, where like poles repel and opposite poles attract?
While a magnet might indeed be considered to have a mind on the account that it perceives and reacts to something (magnetic field), that mind can hardly be called "great".
BTW, I kinda like the idea of viewing sentience as a continuum rather than an on/off thing - from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to single-celled organisms to insects to humans there's a gradually increasing complexity of behaviour and thus sentience rather than a sudden cutoff point. It avoids a lot of problems in both biology (who was the first sentient human being?) and AI (what problems should an AI be able to solve to be considered "strong"?) and avoids magical thinking (such as the persistent attempts to "explain" human mind with quantum mysticism).
The aren't doing nothing... they already DID THE WORK to EARN the money. What's wrong with letting someone save the fruits of their labor?
Do you know what "deflationary" means? It means that the value of money rises, not stay same. So yes, as a matter of fact you earn value by doing nothing under deflation, as long as you have any money at all.
Note that it isn't necessarily an inherently bad idea. After all, if you buy something, that something requires resources to produce (which is why it costs something to begin with), and those resources could potentially be spent on, say, developing infrastructure instead, so it might be worthwhile to reward people for waiting to claim their share. However, in this economic system lack of demand leads to an economic crash, thus demand must be encouraged.
You want me invest imoney, because you'll steal it if I "sit on it". I say that instead, you need to pay a fair return. Historically that's been somewhere between 5 and 8 percent annually.
Do people who mine gold also steal from those who already own some? Because increasing supply causes the prices to go down there too, or at least not go up as rapidly as they otherwise might. Do companies steal from their competitors when they undercut their prices? Or do you simply use the word "steal" whenever you can't have a zero-risk investment at the expense of the rest of the economy?
You tell me that if everyone sits on their money, prices will fall, and that is somehow evil. What would then happen eventually, is that goods won't be worth making, and the supply will dry up, thus increasing prices, once again making them profitable.
This is known as a boom-bust cycle, and yes, it is evil because it makes life needlessly difficult for people, especially those who actually do the work.
When we get rid of central bankers, we end up with something called THE FREE MARKET. You should try it sometime instead of being against it, because it has a rich history of working for most people.
Does the existence of central banks somehow prevent you from freely buying or selling? Do you have any idead what you're talking about? Because this far you have demonstrated ignorance of what "deflationary", "steal" and "free market" mean.
Yet you're not disturbed that we allow public scholl teachers unrestricted access to our children?
We don't, actually. We have very strict rules of what they may or may not do, and enforce that with supervision, often to the point of putting security cameras into the classroom - precisely to avoid the abuse of power, sexually motivated or otherwise.
It's nice that the old book has those passages, but it has a lot of passages that people ignore these days, the fact is that a sizable percentage of religious people do reject scientific evidence when it disagrees with their faith. That's not to say everyone who is religious does so, only that it's far more common in people who are heavily religious.
Well, no. Take the whole global warming farce: either we have a bunch of "sceptics" who deny scientific evidence because it happens to conflict with their preferences, or we have a worldwide conspiracy of climate "scientists" who conspire to falsify their research for whatever reason. Or look at any debate about politics or economy and watch as the side you happen to disagree with ignores all blindingly obvious evidence that the side you agree with (if any) is right. Or take Dawkins himself, who apparently thinks that publishing a book calling religion wrong is going to convince anyone that religion is wrong, assuming they even read it (which is a stretch).
No, the religious people don't have a higher incident of self-deception than people in general because people in general already top the rate at 100%. Only the specific topics of deception vary.
Interestingly, it's supposed to be mandatory by French law for newspapers, but they are one of the very few who comply.
Well, if you have enemies in high places - as any investigative journalist is going to have, unless they live in a fantasy land where power does not corrupt - you'd better cover your back, no?
I see the biggest threat to the price of a BTC as a new, better system. The world does need an electronic currency which is easily traded, but bitcoins are simply to hard to get hold of.
You don't necessarily need a new system, you could reuse Bitcoin and simply start a new blockchain with new rules - say, the number of coins generated per block is a function of the total Bitcoins moved and the coins generated in the transactions in the N last blocks, increasing generation speed when the economy slows and slowering it when it heats up. Care would be needed to avoid a situation where the miners would have an incentive to either drop transactions or generate fake ones (non-broadcast except in a solved block, to keep the transaction fees for themselves and thus make them zero-cost) to manipulate generation rates.
The main problem is: how do you get early adopters for a non-deflationary currency?
Why would you not leave something sinking to avoid zero future value? Any haircut will eventually be washed out over time.
This is precisely the argument for inflation and against deflation: inflation gives you incentive to invest to avoid losing value, thus expanding the economy, while deflation gives you incentive to hoard, thus stagnating the economy.
Deflationary currency rewards you from just sitting there and doing nothing. And what's worse, the more people do that, the higher the reward becomes (because there's less money circulating), thus causing more people to do so and making the problem worse.
I will agree, though, that strong negative torque from engine braking (equivalent to what would cause your brakes to lock up the wheels) can definitely cause you to lose traction and start skidding, but it won't lock the drive wheels unless you define locking differently.
But since wheels locking is bad precisely because it causes you to lose traction and start skidding, the advantage of them doing so without locking would seems questionable at best.
I've been in rollovers in vehicles with roll cages,
The plural here makes a rather strong case that your car should be driven by the computer to as great extent as possible, for the sake of other road-users.
It is quite hard to plausibly fake archaeological gold artifacts. We are much better at making gold today, so there is less silver in modern gold, which is pretty easy detect.
It's the serf mentality: if we no longer had a king, who would allow us to farm his land?
More like corrupt mentality: Serve the interests of large corporations enough and they might remember their faithful servant when it comes campaign contribution time. Which is also why this is not a new cause, just a new sugar daddy.
It's a weird combination of disgusting and pitiful watching one of the rulers of the most powerful empire ever stand in his proverbial street corner and eagerly offer his services to every company that wants them (and probably plenty who don't).
Here's an odd factoid I read a while ago: before the industrial revolution, the population in rural France was more or less constant, for a few hundred years (excluding things like wars etc.). Now *that* is a "sustainable" population, implying also that the country was farmed in a more or less sustainable way.
It doesn't imply any such thing, actually. It simply implies that they didn't run out of virgin land to cultivate before Industrial Revolution.
I think our generation will live to see the decline of the religion of "economic growth" when the "Peak Oil" downslope starts to become steeper.
yes, but those demonstrations weren't headed by imams.
People holding positions of power usually hold them because they love power. It is unreasonable to expect someone who's put in the effort to reach such a position to try and limit the associated power. This is true of all leaders, religious and secular alike. And it's something their followers should never forget: even the wisest of human beings is still a human and can't be trusted to be unbiased when his own interests - or power - are involved.
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Just out of curiosity: what principles are you talking about? Because people caring whether they offend other beings seems to follow logically and obviously from "survival of the fittest" (making enemies makes you and your offspring less likely to survive).
We need to distinguish between two concepts here: what is the common definition of christian (makes noises about Jesus), and who would Jesus consider a genuine follower. Also, you need to understand that the latter is relevant in theology and personal spirituality of christians, while the former is relevant in sociology, which makes it the correct one here. If a bloodthirsty mob led by a firebrand preacher murders an alleged witch the culprits may or may not have stamped their one-way tickets to Hell, but that doesn't change the fact that the murder happened in the name of Christianity, and deserves to be credited on the "religion" side of whatever tabs anyone might be keeping of these things.
In other words, you can't refute critique of religion just by declaring all critique-worthy people "not really religious". They might be, they just don't agree with you on the tenets of your religion. You, them, the both of you, or neither of you might be heretic(s), but that's between you and your god(s) and is certainly not something you could reasonably expect outsiders to know or care about - and thus you shouln't except such an argument to work on them, either.
TL;DR: "Does not mass murder" is not part of the dictionary definition of Christianity or any other religion I know about, so claiming it is is a classic No True Scotsman fallacy.
Obviously any town full of buildings that are both fragile and ancient isn't very prone to earthquakes. So I'd be inclined to think the "earthquake not probable" prediction was quite correct.
Because they're not engineers and geology is not engineering?
Try calculating the correct value to more decimal points than they did. If that fails, you can probably nail them for not specifying the geometry used. If they did, you can always resort to pointing out that the axioms underlaying their work are unprovable - that's not exactly the same as disproving it, but it's kind of a draw.
What? Did you think that mathematics is somehow immune to bullshit and dishonest "scepticism"? Nothing is.
So basically, it's the Italian equivalent of the McDonald's coffee case - except rather than getting burns from hot coffee, the victim spilled cold coffee on his lap and developed skin cancer a decade later, so it's obviously the coffee.
I agree. Who's this "Obama" the summary talks about? And what's "America"?
Is a pretty damn impressive feat.
The last time this case was featured, we got some pretty damn detailed descriptions about how the brave vigilante Zimmerman shot a 100 pounds lighter unarmed criminal in desperate self-defence, or how the helpless kid Martin was brutally murdered by a psychotic racist pursuing him for wearing a hoodie. So, any bets on how this round of defending one's position on an issue one can't possibly have any informed opinion about by making shit up goes?
Yes, we have, and the literal meaning of a phrase is always correct usage, even if a phrase meaning "circular reasoning" in a foreign language was also translated as it once upon a time.
If this is true, then what about the abilities of magnets, where like poles repel and opposite poles attract?
While a magnet might indeed be considered to have a mind on the account that it perceives and reacts to something (magnetic field), that mind can hardly be called "great".
BTW, I kinda like the idea of viewing sentience as a continuum rather than an on/off thing - from subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to single-celled organisms to insects to humans there's a gradually increasing complexity of behaviour and thus sentience rather than a sudden cutoff point. It avoids a lot of problems in both biology (who was the first sentient human being?) and AI (what problems should an AI be able to solve to be considered "strong"?) and avoids magical thinking (such as the persistent attempts to "explain" human mind with quantum mysticism).
Do you know what "deflationary" means? It means that the value of money rises, not stay same. So yes, as a matter of fact you earn value by doing nothing under deflation, as long as you have any money at all.
Note that it isn't necessarily an inherently bad idea. After all, if you buy something, that something requires resources to produce (which is why it costs something to begin with), and those resources could potentially be spent on, say, developing infrastructure instead, so it might be worthwhile to reward people for waiting to claim their share. However, in this economic system lack of demand leads to an economic crash, thus demand must be encouraged.
Do people who mine gold also steal from those who already own some? Because increasing supply causes the prices to go down there too, or at least not go up as rapidly as they otherwise might. Do companies steal from their competitors when they undercut their prices? Or do you simply use the word "steal" whenever you can't have a zero-risk investment at the expense of the rest of the economy?
This is known as a boom-bust cycle, and yes, it is evil because it makes life needlessly difficult for people, especially those who actually do the work.
Does the existence of central banks somehow prevent you from freely buying or selling? Do you have any idead what you're talking about? Because this far you have demonstrated ignorance of what "deflationary", "steal" and "free market" mean.
We don't, actually. We have very strict rules of what they may or may not do, and enforce that with supervision, often to the point of putting security cameras into the classroom - precisely to avoid the abuse of power, sexually motivated or otherwise.
Well, no. Take the whole global warming farce: either we have a bunch of "sceptics" who deny scientific evidence because it happens to conflict with their preferences, or we have a worldwide conspiracy of climate "scientists" who conspire to falsify their research for whatever reason. Or look at any debate about politics or economy and watch as the side you happen to disagree with ignores all blindingly obvious evidence that the side you agree with (if any) is right. Or take Dawkins himself, who apparently thinks that publishing a book calling religion wrong is going to convince anyone that religion is wrong, assuming they even read it (which is a stretch).
No, the religious people don't have a higher incident of self-deception than people in general because people in general already top the rate at 100%. Only the specific topics of deception vary.
Well, if you have enemies in high places - as any investigative journalist is going to have, unless they live in a fantasy land where power does not corrupt - you'd better cover your back, no?
You don't necessarily need a new system, you could reuse Bitcoin and simply start a new blockchain with new rules - say, the number of coins generated per block is a function of the total Bitcoins moved and the coins generated in the transactions in the N last blocks, increasing generation speed when the economy slows and slowering it when it heats up. Care would be needed to avoid a situation where the miners would have an incentive to either drop transactions or generate fake ones (non-broadcast except in a solved block, to keep the transaction fees for themselves and thus make them zero-cost) to manipulate generation rates.
The main problem is: how do you get early adopters for a non-deflationary currency?
This is precisely the argument for inflation and against deflation: inflation gives you incentive to invest to avoid losing value, thus expanding the economy, while deflation gives you incentive to hoard, thus stagnating the economy.
Deflationary currency rewards you from just sitting there and doing nothing. And what's worse, the more people do that, the higher the reward becomes (because there's less money circulating), thus causing more people to do so and making the problem worse.
But since wheels locking is bad precisely because it causes you to lose traction and start skidding, the advantage of them doing so without locking would seems questionable at best.
The plural here makes a rather strong case that your car should be driven by the computer to as great extent as possible, for the sake of other road-users.
Aparently.
Because silver can't be bought and mixed in.
"Fascism" is any political view you happen to disagree with.
That manner being pseudonymous tough-guy talk over the Internet, apparently. That'll teach those gosh darn hippies.
More like corrupt mentality: Serve the interests of large corporations enough and they might remember their faithful servant when it comes campaign contribution time. Which is also why this is not a new cause, just a new sugar daddy.
It's a weird combination of disgusting and pitiful watching one of the rulers of the most powerful empire ever stand in his proverbial street corner and eagerly offer his services to every company that wants them (and probably plenty who don't).
It doesn't imply any such thing, actually. It simply implies that they didn't run out of virgin land to cultivate before Industrial Revolution.
And most of us likely no longer than that.
People holding positions of power usually hold them because they love power. It is unreasonable to expect someone who's put in the effort to reach such a position to try and limit the associated power. This is true of all leaders, religious and secular alike. And it's something their followers should never forget: even the wisest of human beings is still a human and can't be trusted to be unbiased when his own interests - or power - are involved.