The guy spouted something as a fact, while actually speaking out of his butt, and I called him on it, along with providing actual, factual data.
Your rant is cute, but ignores the most important point: the "actual, factual data" you were kind enough to link to completely vindicates that other guy and proves you to be incorrect, because she really could buy a house in that neighborhood for that amount.
They did not put the words "corporation" or "money" anywhere in the Bill of Rights.
They didn't need to mention "corporation", because corporations are groups of individuals, and those individuals have rights. The fact that they exercise those rights as a groups is irrelevant.
They didn't need to mention "money", because it's incidental - the purpose of the law was to prevent certain people from using the press to do certain things, period.
Or look at it this way - if the law in question didn't abridge people's speech or use of the press in any way, then what was it's purpose? And if it abridges in any way then the First Amendment doesn't care how it's being done - blocking people's money is just as much of an infringement as burning the presses, arresting peaceful protesters, or censoring the internet.
Right. If it's not to be taken literally, why would anyone argue that corporations should be extended the rights of personhood?
We don't take it literally because it's a deliberate workaround to the common-law rules about "persons" (people - who can preform legal actions) and "non-persons" (trees, rocks, colors - who can't). Persons can own things, sign contracts, commit crimes, get sued, etc. and non-persons can't. Since this presented problems as people formed larger and more complex groups, the courts decided that a third, in-between type was needed. So now we have actual persons, non-persons, and legal persons. Legal persons only get the ability to participate in the legal system, rights they inherit from the people that run them, and a few oddballs.
As for why anyone would want this, imagine how a non-profit would be affected if it wasn't. The Red Cross wouldn't be getting donations because it couldn't take possession of the money, it couldn't rent equipment because it couldn't sign contracts, and it couldn't be held accountable if it decides not to pay the people it employs so nobody would want to work for them.
You see not a word about "giving money to..." or "buying..." or "political contributions" in that famous amendment.
So you wouldn't have a problem with the government banning the buying and selling of presses (and other kinds of media)? Or preventing you from paying people to run them? Next you'll say the Sixth Amendment's "Right to Counsel" doesn't mention money, so I can't hire a lawyer; or the Second Amendment's right to "bear Arms" only means I can keep the ones I make myself, not buy them; or...
The notion that money=speech
Money and speech are different things, but some kinds of communication are very difficult to use without an exchanging of money happening somewhere along the line. By making it illegal to spend money on those kids of communication, the government is effectively banning it.
and that corporation=person or even that organizations have the same civil rights as individuals does not appear until...
... people needed to be able to sue corporations, and the law said you could only sue a "person". That's why it's called a "legal fiction" - it's not to be taken literally.
That's why it's a violation of my liberty that I can't bribe my way out of traffic tickets. That I can't buy my way into a medical license. That I can't pay a judge to kick you off your home.
No. What would be a violation of your liberty is making it illegal for you buy billboards saying "Raise the Speed Limit on 3rd Street", "More Rights for Midwives and Nursing Practitioners", or "Protect Eminent Domain Now!".
The article you cited does not contradict what I said - it doesn't suggest that the weather can more accurately predicted or that it can be controlled. It does suggest that those issues can be compensated for, but that does not make my statement incorrect.
the backbone of the grid is just a very small percentage of the complete grid; the last mile is 90% the cost of the grid.
Which is irrelevant - even when we only look at one of the larger-capacity links the existing backbone is only a small fraction of what your plan requires. This directly contradicts what your implication that the grid is nearly ready for the wind energy plan you've discussed.
So you're saying that a single plant can't supply base load ?
Yes, I haven't seen anyone imply otherwise. But you're evading the question - can nuclear power supply base-load? You originally said 'No'.
if you're building x nukes for base load, then you'll also need to compare with the same capacity in wind-turbines.
Yes: nukes deliver about 90% of their rated capacity, while wind only gives about 30%. Nukes generally don't deliver due to scheduled maintainance that can be rescheduled if needed, while wind doesn't because of fairly unpredictable and unchangeable weather. Nukes tend to have problems in isolation (individual plants), while a calm day can extend over an entire region, which means the grid will have to handle larger currents over longer distances to compensate. On the other hand, nukes present more safety issues, have a larger PR problem, and would require more legal changes (like allowing reprocessing). The NIMBY issues is hard to judge (wind often only works well on specific sites, while nukes can be sited more flexibly - so wind generally gets pushed on people, but the nuke can go wherever people are more accepting).
most EU countries are already connected through HVDC. it only needs some extra cabling across seas. (most of which are already planned.) (the canal, the mediterrennean and the baltic sea)
No. Take the HVDC Cross-Channel between the UK and France: it supplies about 5% of the electricity for the UK - you'd need to up it's capacity by an order of magnitude or so to really make it useful for wind power redistribution rather than just balancing or as a supplementary supply. And remember, that's one of the higher-capacity ones, and even if upgraded would just get you the opposite shore - you'd still need to get power up north, and the existing grid isn't built to take that kind of distribution.
the original poster talked about one single power plant.
Only in the context of anti-nuke sentiment replacing a nuclear plant with a traditional one. There was no suggestion that a single nuclear plant, with no backup or connection with the grid, would be an acceptable base-load supplier.
it needs HVDC connections. a few thousand miles of them for europe
Forgive me, but that seems absurdly optimistic. It would take a grid with several thousand miles of cable just to reach every country in the EU, and that's without getting to the actual sources and local grids, adding additional power sources to make up for long-distance losses, building in redundancy, or taking into account geography, NIMBY issues, etc. Next will you tell me that it's going to be "too cheap to meter"?
I explicitly used the contradiction 1 nuke many nukes.
Not in the post I originally replied to: "Nuclear can NOT supply base-load." This is a statement about an entire type of power generation, not a single plant.
if wind turbines can't be used because of intermittency, nuclear power plants can't be used and vice-versa.
True in the black-and-white sense, but those sources may require vastly different grids to make them good supplies of base power, and those different requirements may make one much more practical than the other.
http://nuclear-news.net/2009/11/10/examining-the-myth-of-nuclear-and-baseload-power/
Nuclear can NOT supply base-load
You quoted someone saying that almost any form of power generation can be used for base-load power to suggest that nukes can't generate base-load power.
And that's ignoring the fact that your statement is from a professional environmentalist being quoted on an anti-nuke site.
I don't know why you thought your post would be persuasive.
Vaccines and antibiotics are fundamentally different (flu shots and other vaccines are not part of the superbug problem), but the mindset remains the same.
Actually, they're opposites - popular culture pushes people away from vaccines (the second most effective medical intervention in human history) because they "cause autism" and other such nonsense, and toward antibiotics (that generate superbugs) even for viral infections that they're totally ineffective against.
The logical, manipulative answer is obvious - tell a bunch of uneducated celebrities that vaccines don't cause autism, but that antibiotics do cause it.:)
Off topic, sure - just like the post I was replying to. No argument there.
But trolling? Pretty ballsy for someone Cowering behind Anonymity.
And they really need to add a "-1 No Sense of Humor" mod.
It was Bush for 8 years, and his replacement happens to have a virtually identical domestic policy, which means we are essentially screwed.
Hey, now! Bush wanted to take our clumsy, wasteful pyramid scheme of a social security system and make it slightly worse, while Obama wants to take our clumsy, wasteful hellhole of a health care system and make it significantly worse. We may still be getting screwed, but it really is going in a different orifice.
Now, when it comes to foreign policy, it's all the same - spend absurd amounts of money bombing people until they learn to love us.
If you were right, then a new automobile should self assemble from the parts in the junkyard.
Why? Cars are built from very different materials and organized in very different ways than living things, and thus behave very differently.
In the same way, the information content in birds is very different than that of reptiles.
Yes, so... what? That same information shows many similarities, and the fossil record shows the general path that led to a single group of animals giving rise to both modern reptiles and birds.
Maybe your ancestors were monkeys, but certainly not mine.
Yes, some of them were, several million years ago. It's pretty obvious that you don't like the idea, and I think that's your only reason for dismissing the clear evidence of common ancestry.
Shuffling information around does not create anything new, any more than shuffling marbles in a bag of marbles creates new totally different marbles.
I don't get the point of this analogy any more than I got the one about the magic cars.
In our human experience, information only comes from a mind.
Right, because the ideas that it's a cloudy day here, that wood burns, and that falling of a cliff can hurt are all ideas that were generated solely by a mind, with no connection to the outside world.
I have chosen to believe in God being responsible for creation, especially life.
You can believe anything you want, but if you want me to believe it's anything more substantial than your personal preference you're going to need evidence.
Apparently, you have chosen to believe in time and chance instead.
No, I believe that the variety of life we see today developed over a long period from one or more much simpler forms, and that they developed because of a process that lets random events that turn out to be useful accumulate. And I didn't choose to believe this any more than I chose to believe in gravity - it's so overwhelmingly obvious that it's inescapable.
From the surrounding environment. Putting complexity aside for a moment, when rabbits become white in an arctic environment, where does the information that "being dark colors is bad" come from? From the fact that their background is often snowy and that they're often hunted visually. So from an information-centric standpoint, the fit between a critter's genes and their environment (as in their fitness) acts as a signal to the critter's gene pool about how to change the frequency of various alleles (that's evolution).
To make something more complex, we then have to add some variation. Imagine that a fish gets a duplicate of the gene for a blood clotting protein (this is rather common). Later on in one of its descendants, one of those copies mutates into a form that inhibits the formation of ice crystals. In many environments, this gene would get lost rather easily because there's no evolutionary pressure to keep it, but in very cold environments it might make the difference between life and death. The fish now is more complex (it has an extra part), and the information that "that extra protein is useful" came from its environment (freezing temps).
This can also happen when a protein happens to do two different jobs, gets duplicated, and each copy specializes - eventually neither can do both jobs, but each does one job better than the original.
I think that the statement it proves evolutionary theory is a bit, strong
Right, it would be more precise to say that it's evidence in support of some aspects of evolutionary theory.
people get confused about certain things like, a species ability to adapt to its environment, is that it fails to explain how a completely different species evolves
When things adapt in enough different ways they become something completely different.
Certain ideas about them being seperate species are about to shatter some of the ideas of evolutionary theory
No, that's exactly what evolutionary theory predicts - a spectrum of reproductive relationships between populations ranging from "easily interbreeds" through "can interbreed" to "can't interbreed".
it doesn't support the idea species change can only happen in a said species, not by interbreeding between "species".
No evolutionary biologists are saying that hybridization can't happen, or that it doesn't affect evolution. Period.
Secondly, it is not clear even from a biological point of view how a new complex system can arise by random chance
Yes it is - things start simple, and get more complex over time. And it isn't "by random chance", but by non-random selection between randomly generated alternatives.
How all 1 billion of those proteins arose by chance over time is a huge problem for evolutionary proponents.
No, it isn't. And you should know there are only about 23,000 proteins in humans.
Third and finally, there are certain things about the theory that the laws of thermodynamics seem to be in violation
The only way someone could believe something so completely wrong is to be utterly ignorant of thermodynamics.
I don't believe in the "religion" of evolutionary theory
That's because there is no "religion" involved, and because someone's been feeding you bad information.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
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Religion in Video Games
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· Score: 4, Insightful
How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800?
Where to begin?
Dark skinned people can be used as work animals because they're "Hammites" - cursed by God for the sins of Ham after the flood.
Plenty of US states' constitutions barred non-believers from public office.
Some people are still trying to enforce them.
Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.
Some states won't allow single people to adopt kids - solely because that's the only legal way to bar gays from adopting.
Then there's the whole gay marriage thing...
And that's what I can come up with in two minutes while sleep deprived.
But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion".
Killing people to spread Communism isn't the same thing as killing to spread atheism, atheism alone doesn't tell you to kill anyone (nor does it endorse any other moral stance). Christianity is based on a book that bluntly says to stone certain people to death, that repeatedly discusses the proper way to practice slavery, that says God approves of some kids of genocide (yes, in order to spread His religion) - you have to add something else (like a specific interpretation) to avoid endorsing the bad stuff.
Re:a game that tells the truth about religion
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Religion in Video Games
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Worst case - converting to Christianity from Islam - can get you killed in many countries.
To be fair, converting to anything from Islam can get you killed in those countries - it isn't really Christian-specific. Can you name someplace where Christians are hard-core persecuted significantly more than atheists or Jews?
...I don't think that it is always the case anymore.
Collecting stamps is a hobby, not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Attempting to convincing others that non-stamp collectors can be moral, that collecting stamps might not lead to eternal life, or just plain mocking stamp collectors - those might be hobbies.
You're correct. First, Pascal bluntly states that the existence of God is not rationally decidable. Second, he offers his argument as a way for those who want to believe, but can't because of rational arguments, to at least practice the rituals and in other ways quiet their skepticism.
From my perspective, that means that the wager exists for people who want to feel rational and also want to believe in God, but can't because their reason leads them to agnosticism (or with Occam's Razor, to weak atheism). Pascal hopes that his wager will help you to "quiet your proudly critical intellect", and thus resolve the conflicting desires. The problem is that most people don't know the difference between a reason and a rationalization, and continue to use the wager as if it were a convincing argument.
I read up to "And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize." and stopped reading. Simply a false statement
It's interesting that you have such a strong opinion, but didn't bother to back it up with any kind of argument.
More importantly, even if most of my hypotheticals turn out to be wrong, they still need to be argued against in order to support a Pascal's Wager-style argument. And that's the main point - to successfully pull off that kind of argument, one would have to conceive of, and make a solid case against, every other possible outcome. I submit that it is impossible to do this (except, perhaps, in trivial cases).
I rarely sink this low in internet debates, but you, sir, are a fucking idiot.
There is no point in a debate more gratifying than when one's opponent realizes that they have no argument left at all, and must either concede the point or attempt to evade rational debate in favor of a shouting match. You do me a great compliment by doing this, and the fact that I managed to be so clear and thorough as to accomplish this in a single post makes your acknowledgment unusually beneficent.
Thank you kindly, best wishes, and better luck next time.
I liked your post, it was passionate and articulate, except for this bit of drivel you stuck in there:
This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument.
Pascal's wager is never a good argument. It's still a false dichotomy, and even without the usual issue of whether a person can simply choose to change their beliefs (like the original version), it allows the one proposing the wager to set up outcomes favorable to them while ignoring other possibilities.
If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it.
Even if AGW is completely real, it may be more mild that we expect and turn out to be a mere nuisance. Or it may be easy to geoengineer global cooling 60 years from now. Or it might be fairly cheap to build levees around cities, move and rebuild other bit of civilization, ect. Or there may be some other solution that I haven't thought of, or even that nobody has thought of yet.
If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water.
If AGW isn't real, and we take aggressive action, we will have wasted trillions that could have been spent on cleaning up real pollution more effectively. And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize. And dictators use the threat of AGW to get other countries to give them nuclear tech, which they use to make weapons. And many other things that could possibly go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy spouted something as a fact, while actually speaking out of his butt, and I called him on it, along with providing actual, factual data.
Your rant is cute, but ignores the most important point: the "actual, factual data" you were kind enough to link to completely vindicates that other guy and proves you to be incorrect, because she really could buy a house in that neighborhood for that amount.
Wow. You win the award for deliberate obtuseness:
They did not put the words "corporation" or "money" anywhere in the Bill of Rights.
They didn't need to mention "corporation", because corporations are groups of individuals, and those individuals have rights. The fact that they exercise those rights as a groups is irrelevant.
They didn't need to mention "money", because it's incidental - the purpose of the law was to prevent certain people from using the press to do certain things, period.
Or look at it this way - if the law in question didn't abridge people's speech or use of the press in any way, then what was it's purpose? And if it abridges in any way then the First Amendment doesn't care how it's being done - blocking people's money is just as much of an infringement as burning the presses, arresting peaceful protesters, or censoring the internet.
Right. If it's not to be taken literally, why would anyone argue that corporations should be extended the rights of personhood?
We don't take it literally because it's a deliberate workaround to the common-law rules about "persons" (people - who can preform legal actions) and "non-persons" (trees, rocks, colors - who can't). Persons can own things, sign contracts, commit crimes, get sued, etc. and non-persons can't. Since this presented problems as people formed larger and more complex groups, the courts decided that a third, in-between type was needed. So now we have actual persons, non-persons, and legal persons. Legal persons only get the ability to participate in the legal system, rights they inherit from the people that run them, and a few oddballs.
As for why anyone would want this, imagine how a non-profit would be affected if it wasn't. The Red Cross wouldn't be getting donations because it couldn't take possession of the money, it couldn't rent equipment because it couldn't sign contracts, and it couldn't be held accountable if it decides not to pay the people it employs so nobody would want to work for them.
You see not a word about "giving money to..." or "buying..." or "political contributions" in that famous amendment.
So you wouldn't have a problem with the government banning the buying and selling of presses (and other kinds of media)? Or preventing you from paying people to run them? Next you'll say the Sixth Amendment's "Right to Counsel" doesn't mention money, so I can't hire a lawyer; or the Second Amendment's right to "bear Arms" only means I can keep the ones I make myself, not buy them; or ...
The notion that money=speech
Money and speech are different things, but some kinds of communication are very difficult to use without an exchanging of money happening somewhere along the line. By making it illegal to spend money on those kids of communication, the government is effectively banning it.
and that corporation=person or even that organizations have the same civil rights as individuals does not appear until ...
That's why it's a violation of my liberty that I can't bribe my way out of traffic tickets. That I can't buy my way into a medical license. That I can't pay a judge to kick you off your home.
No. What would be a violation of your liberty is making it illegal for you buy billboards saying "Raise the Speed Limit on 3rd Street", "More Rights for Midwives and Nursing Practitioners", or "Protect Eminent Domain Now!".
while wind doesn't because of fairly unpredictable and unchangeable weather
you're simply wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_power_source#European_super_grid
The article you cited does not contradict what I said - it doesn't suggest that the weather can more accurately predicted or that it can be controlled. It does suggest that those issues can be compensated for, but that does not make my statement incorrect.
the backbone of the grid is just a very small percentage of the complete grid; the last mile is 90% the cost of the grid.
Which is irrelevant - even when we only look at one of the larger-capacity links the existing backbone is only a small fraction of what your plan requires. This directly contradicts what your implication that the grid is nearly ready for the wind energy plan you've discussed.
So you're saying that a single plant can't supply base load ?
Yes, I haven't seen anyone imply otherwise. But you're evading the question - can nuclear power supply base-load? You originally said 'No'.
if you're building x nukes for base load, then you'll also need to compare with the same capacity in wind-turbines.
Yes: nukes deliver about 90% of their rated capacity, while wind only gives about 30%. Nukes generally don't deliver due to scheduled maintainance that can be rescheduled if needed, while wind doesn't because of fairly unpredictable and unchangeable weather. Nukes tend to have problems in isolation (individual plants), while a calm day can extend over an entire region, which means the grid will have to handle larger currents over longer distances to compensate. On the other hand, nukes present more safety issues, have a larger PR problem, and would require more legal changes (like allowing reprocessing). The NIMBY issues is hard to judge (wind often only works well on specific sites, while nukes can be sited more flexibly - so wind generally gets pushed on people, but the nuke can go wherever people are more accepting).
most EU countries are already connected through HVDC. it only needs some extra cabling across seas. (most of which are already planned.) (the canal, the mediterrennean and the baltic sea)
No. Take the HVDC Cross-Channel between the UK and France: it supplies about 5% of the electricity for the UK - you'd need to up it's capacity by an order of magnitude or so to really make it useful for wind power redistribution rather than just balancing or as a supplementary supply. And remember, that's one of the higher-capacity ones, and even if upgraded would just get you the opposite shore - you'd still need to get power up north, and the existing grid isn't built to take that kind of distribution.
the original poster talked about one single power plant.
Only in the context of anti-nuke sentiment replacing a nuclear plant with a traditional one. There was no suggestion that a single nuclear plant, with no backup or connection with the grid, would be an acceptable base-load supplier.
it needs HVDC connections. a few thousand miles of them for europe
Forgive me, but that seems absurdly optimistic. It would take a grid with several thousand miles of cable just to reach every country in the EU, and that's without getting to the actual sources and local grids, adding additional power sources to make up for long-distance losses, building in redundancy, or taking into account geography, NIMBY issues, etc. Next will you tell me that it's going to be "too cheap to meter"?
I explicitly used the contradiction 1 nuke many nukes.
Not in the post I originally replied to: "Nuclear can NOT supply base-load." This is a statement about an entire type of power generation, not a single plant.
if wind turbines can't be used because of intermittency, nuclear power plants can't be used and vice-versa.
True in the black-and-white sense, but those sources may require vastly different grids to make them good supplies of base power, and those different requirements may make one much more practical than the other.
'the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant'
Seems to directly contradicts this:
Nuclear can NOT supply base-load
That's all I'm saying.
http://nuclear-news.net/2009/11/10/examining-the-myth-of-nuclear-and-baseload-power/
Nuclear can NOT supply base-load
You quoted someone saying that almost any form of power generation can be used for base-load power to suggest that nukes can't generate base-load power.
And that's ignoring the fact that your statement is from a professional environmentalist being quoted on an anti-nuke site.
I don't know why you thought your post would be persuasive.
Vaccines and antibiotics are fundamentally different (flu shots and other vaccines are not part of the superbug problem), but the mindset remains the same.
Actually, they're opposites - popular culture pushes people away from vaccines (the second most effective medical intervention in human history) because they "cause autism" and other such nonsense, and toward antibiotics (that generate superbugs) even for viral infections that they're totally ineffective against.
The logical, manipulative answer is obvious - tell a bunch of uneducated celebrities that vaccines don't cause autism, but that antibiotics do cause it. :)
No one wants to get slapped with the "Super Villain" label.
Please don't speak for the rest of us. Thank you. :)
But I guarantee you the first jihadist that pops a laser ray out of an observatory and melts ${HISTORIC_MONUMENT} is going to have hell to pay.
Right, 'cause at this moment, Osama bin Laden is so paying for what he did.
Off topic, sure - just like the post I was replying to. No argument there.
But trolling? Pretty ballsy for someone Cowering behind Anonymity.
And they really need to add a "-1 No Sense of Humor" mod.
It was Bush for 8 years, and his replacement happens to have a virtually identical domestic policy, which means we are essentially screwed.
Hey, now! Bush wanted to take our clumsy, wasteful pyramid scheme of a social security system and make it slightly worse, while Obama wants to take our clumsy, wasteful hellhole of a health care system and make it significantly worse. We may still be getting screwed, but it really is going in a different orifice.
Now, when it comes to foreign policy, it's all the same - spend absurd amounts of money bombing people until they learn to love us.
If you were right, then a new automobile should self assemble from the parts in the junkyard.
Why? Cars are built from very different materials and organized in very different ways than living things, and thus behave very differently.
In the same way, the information content in birds is very different than that of reptiles. ... what? That same information shows many similarities, and the fossil record shows the general path that led to a single group of animals giving rise to both modern reptiles and birds.
Yes, so
Maybe your ancestors were monkeys, but certainly not mine.
Yes, some of them were, several million years ago. It's pretty obvious that you don't like the idea, and I think that's your only reason for dismissing the clear evidence of common ancestry.
Shuffling information around does not create anything new, any more than shuffling marbles in a bag of marbles creates new totally different marbles.
I don't get the point of this analogy any more than I got the one about the magic cars.
In our human experience, information only comes from a mind.
Right, because the ideas that it's a cloudy day here, that wood burns, and that falling of a cliff can hurt are all ideas that were generated solely by a mind, with no connection to the outside world.
I have chosen to believe in God being responsible for creation, especially life.
You can believe anything you want, but if you want me to believe it's anything more substantial than your personal preference you're going to need evidence.
Apparently, you have chosen to believe in time and chance instead.
No, I believe that the variety of life we see today developed over a long period from one or more much simpler forms, and that they developed because of a process that lets random events that turn out to be useful accumulate. And I didn't choose to believe this any more than I chose to believe in gravity - it's so overwhelmingly obvious that it's inescapable.
Where does that information come from?
From the surrounding environment. Putting complexity aside for a moment, when rabbits become white in an arctic environment, where does the information that "being dark colors is bad" come from? From the fact that their background is often snowy and that they're often hunted visually. So from an information-centric standpoint, the fit between a critter's genes and their environment (as in their fitness) acts as a signal to the critter's gene pool about how to change the frequency of various alleles (that's evolution).
To make something more complex, we then have to add some variation. Imagine that a fish gets a duplicate of the gene for a blood clotting protein (this is rather common). Later on in one of its descendants, one of those copies mutates into a form that inhibits the formation of ice crystals. In many environments, this gene would get lost rather easily because there's no evolutionary pressure to keep it, but in very cold environments it might make the difference between life and death. The fish now is more complex (it has an extra part), and the information that "that extra protein is useful" came from its environment (freezing temps).
This can also happen when a protein happens to do two different jobs, gets duplicated, and each copy specializes - eventually neither can do both jobs, but each does one job better than the original.
and I always wondered why people cut off the ends of their penis.
They almost never do - even the rare person who willingly does that kind of thing almost always gets someone else to do it.
I think that the statement it proves evolutionary theory is a bit, strong
Right, it would be more precise to say that it's evidence in support of some aspects of evolutionary theory.
people get confused about certain things like, a species ability to adapt to its environment, is that it fails to explain how a completely different species evolves
When things adapt in enough different ways they become something completely different.
Certain ideas about them being seperate species are about to shatter some of the ideas of evolutionary theory
No, that's exactly what evolutionary theory predicts - a spectrum of reproductive relationships between populations ranging from "easily interbreeds" through "can interbreed" to "can't interbreed".
it doesn't support the idea species change can only happen in a said species, not by interbreeding between "species".
No evolutionary biologists are saying that hybridization can't happen, or that it doesn't affect evolution. Period.
Secondly, it is not clear even from a biological point of view how a new complex system can arise by random chance
Yes it is - things start simple, and get more complex over time. And it isn't "by random chance", but by non-random selection between randomly generated alternatives.
How all 1 billion of those proteins arose by chance over time is a huge problem for evolutionary proponents.
No, it isn't. And you should know there are only about 23,000 proteins in humans.
Third and finally, there are certain things about the theory that the laws of thermodynamics seem to be in violation
The only way someone could believe something so completely wrong is to be utterly ignorant of thermodynamics.
I don't believe in the "religion" of evolutionary theory
That's because there is no "religion" involved, and because someone's been feeding you bad information.
How many people have Christians persecuted since, say, 1800?
Where to begin?
Dark skinned people can be used as work animals because they're "Hammites" - cursed by God for the sins of Ham after the flood.
Plenty of US states' constitutions barred non-believers from public office.
Some people are still trying to enforce them.
Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.
Some states won't allow single people to adopt kids - solely because that's the only legal way to bar gays from adopting.
Then there's the whole gay marriage thing...
And that's what I can come up with in two minutes while sleep deprived.
But I'm sure it makes you feel better that atheists did it because they didn't want to "spread their religion".
Killing people to spread Communism isn't the same thing as killing to spread atheism, atheism alone doesn't tell you to kill anyone (nor does it endorse any other moral stance). Christianity is based on a book that bluntly says to stone certain people to death, that repeatedly discusses the proper way to practice slavery, that says God approves of some kids of genocide (yes, in order to spread His religion) - you have to add something else (like a specific interpretation) to avoid endorsing the bad stuff.
Worst case - converting to Christianity from Islam - can get you killed in many countries.
To be fair, converting to anything from Islam can get you killed in those countries - it isn't really Christian-specific. Can you name someplace where Christians are hard-core persecuted significantly more than atheists or Jews?
Collecting stamps is a hobby, not collecting stamps is not a hobby. Attempting to convincing others that non-stamp collectors can be moral, that collecting stamps might not lead to eternal life, or just plain mocking stamp collectors - those might be hobbies.
You're correct. First, Pascal bluntly states that the existence of God is not rationally decidable. Second, he offers his argument as a way for those who want to believe, but can't because of rational arguments, to at least practice the rituals and in other ways quiet their skepticism.
From my perspective, that means that the wager exists for people who want to feel rational and also want to believe in God, but can't because their reason leads them to agnosticism (or with Occam's Razor, to weak atheism). Pascal hopes that his wager will help you to "quiet your proudly critical intellect", and thus resolve the conflicting desires. The problem is that most people don't know the difference between a reason and a rationalization, and continue to use the wager as if it were a convincing argument.
I read up to "And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize." and stopped reading. Simply a false statement
It's interesting that you have such a strong opinion, but didn't bother to back it up with any kind of argument.
More importantly, even if most of my hypotheticals turn out to be wrong, they still need to be argued against in order to support a Pascal's Wager-style argument. And that's the main point - to successfully pull off that kind of argument, one would have to conceive of, and make a solid case against, every other possible outcome. I submit that it is impossible to do this (except, perhaps, in trivial cases).
I rarely sink this low in internet debates, but you, sir, are a fucking idiot.
There is no point in a debate more gratifying than when one's opponent realizes that they have no argument left at all, and must either concede the point or attempt to evade rational debate in favor of a shouting match. You do me a great compliment by doing this, and the fact that I managed to be so clear and thorough as to accomplish this in a single post makes your acknowledgment unusually beneficent.
Thank you kindly, best wishes, and better luck next time.
I liked your post, it was passionate and articulate, except for this bit of drivel you stuck in there:
This is a classic case of Pascal's Wager, except that in this case it is actually a good argument.
Pascal's wager is never a good argument. It's still a false dichotomy, and even without the usual issue of whether a person can simply choose to change their beliefs (like the original version), it allows the one proposing the wager to set up outcomes favorable to them while ignoring other possibilities.
If we do nothing and anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is real, we risk the end of civilization as we know it.
Even if AGW is completely real, it may be more mild that we expect and turn out to be a mere nuisance. Or it may be easy to geoengineer global cooling 60 years from now. Or it might be fairly cheap to build levees around cities, move and rebuild other bit of civilization, ect. Or there may be some other solution that I haven't thought of, or even that nobody has thought of yet.
If we take aggressive action and AGW turns out to be hogwash, then we'll have taken long steps toward cleaning up our environment: a net positive for many reasons unrelated to AGW, including reduced loss of habitat, healthier oceans (and fisheries), and fewer pollutants in our food and water.
If AGW isn't real, and we take aggressive action, we will have wasted trillions that could have been spent on cleaning up real pollution more effectively. And millions die in third-world nations because they aren't allowed to use their fossil fuels to industrialize. And dictators use the threat of AGW to get other countries to give them nuclear tech, which they use to make weapons. And many other things that could possibly go wrong.