I have a genuine question for anyone knowledgable on this. When media producers tried something similar for music cd's it turned out that to save cost mostly everyone in the entire industry was using the computer cdrom chips because they were cheaper for everything (including car stereos).
When they tried to start rolling out these new cd's they didn't work in lots of unintended places (like cars), and this mostly led to them to be seemingly phased back out (i admit i haven't bought a cd in years though, so maybe i'm just not hearing about it anymore because no one else is either).
So my question: is this different? I would think the same laws of economics would mean just about every dvd player was following the same basic idea. Use 1 basic drive guts everywhere to drive the prices way down. Which means lots of genuine uses (like regular dvd players) would stop working, hence driving it away again. Is this not the case? If not does anyone know why this happened in the cd world but not dvd?
NVIDIA actually makes a product called "Pure Video" or something like that. It enables the NVIDIA cards hardware to do the deinterlacing. Before I found the NVIDIA software performance/deinterlacing were just terrible. Now I've been watching hd content from my media center for a year, on a computer I put together 2 or 3 years ago.
I'm not necessarily sure I buy this. They released all those silly next-gen audio disc formats no one ever bought. You have to give me a compelling reason to switch.
I think they've managed to cross the line finally. All the early adopters, who are your bread and butter, are getting shafted. I'm not going out to buy another big flat TV, and upgrade my media center hardware, for a slightly better picture. My current setup plays the hd content I download just fine.
I'm not going to throw away my car stereo for some slightly better sounding tunes. I'm not tossing out everything I have now for this monster. I mean it will downsample to dvd quality on all my hardware anyway, so there really is no benefit to the end user. Mom and pop will see a DVD player for $50 and a hd-whatever for $500+ and just get the DVD. The early adopters who drive this sort of switch anyway are all left scratching their heads.
They needed to make the offer very compelling for us all to switch, and they've just failed on every level to do that.
What's the point of democratic government if not to impose a generally agreed-upon morality?
Slightly curde; it does many other things. Regardless, christian dogma has little to do with the modern form of morality/laws our government practices. In the US most of the social advances in society came at a time when society walked away from the christian norm at the time.
Since the majority of the population of the United States is Christian, it seems perfectly appropriate that our elected representatives reflect a Christian morality
Also crude. The problem is what IS a christian morality? So many different sects and so many different beliefs. The secret is figuring out what should be a personal moral choice and what negatively affects the rest of us. No meat on Friday is practiced by some. It's a peronal moral choice, and if a representative took office it is within his rights to continue practicing that. He/she should also be free to go out in his spare time and encourage others to join him/her in that belief. I'm not sure that means he should start creating legistlation forcing the rest of us to do the same.
We practice this give and take everyday in every aspect of society. Religion is inherently intolerant of such leniency. Which is why it doesn't belong in government.
If you think that the government should be entirely devoid of morality
Actually what you are presecribing is anarchy. "Moral" to a government or business is what the law says it can do. You can't go around subjecting them to everyone's whim about what moral is. Nothing would ever be moral to 100% of people. We have laws to define larger social morality. Your personal morality can be whatever you want, but if it violates the larger societal moral code we will come after you.
If it is not, then you are certainly no better than those people (who I assume you do not view in a positive light).
You missed the point of the argument. If it's ok for 1 group to go around enouraging belief in magical things with no concrete evidence, why is it not equally ok for others to go around spreading the idea that we shouldn't be basing our moral prinicples on magical ideologies?
If they believe this, then is it not a theological statement?
Not everything is religious. If I believe that atoms exist, even having not seen one, I can read and use tests to try and support this belief. Since no evidence can be presented to prove that a all powerful diety exists, it is fair to assume there isn't one. That's not theology, it's just simple logic.
evidence collected in the real world does not necessarily agree with it. Consider this: how many people were killed as a result of the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist regimes in the last 100 years?
The evidence doesn't necessarily oppose it either. None of your killers claimed to be atheists. Nazi beliefs are very similar to religious ones. They touted belief in a system that could not be supported with any facts, preferring to go after people who opposed them, rather than argue the facts.
Why stop at 100 years? There were crusades. We burned women as witches. Different religious groups have gone to war over the holy-lands over the years. Muslims blow themselves up to get us nasty non-islamics. Scientists of many different principles were denounced and threatened with death because their verifiable facts disputed the held beliefs. All for what? Some magical belief in an unverifiable deity.
Atheists want to rock that boat. How are they supposed to respect that?
More recently we have abortion. Why should abortion be illegal? Because these groups "feel" it's wrong. Why? Well they go take a few out-of-context quotes from a document heavily edited and created thousands of years ago to support their opinion. You can't argue with that kind of crazy.
"political ideology" is far more dangerous than "religion"
From an atheist perspective there is no difference between the two. They both behave the same, and inherently have only their own self-interest at heart. The most unimaginable wickedness the world has ever seen was always born from 1 of the 2. If you don't have verifiable evidence to support your opinion it has no place being policy of any kind. Either religious or political.
There is a difference between (crazy) personal beliefs, and attempting to impose your (crazy) personal beliefs upon others.
Why is it crazy to attempt to change people's minds for what one sees as better? Your religious types try to appeal to a high-ground type of morality, backed by an all powerful deity. Atheists are usually spouting their opinions about not believing in non-verifiable dogma that empowers those that push it.
I would like to start taking 1.3% of your income. Not wanting to give it to me is a "terrible" reason to withdraw from this offer. How would you like to set this up?
There is nothing even stopping a government from funding all "real religions" (ie something that is not obviously a bullshit scam like Scientology).
In practice what it means is you cannot fund any religions, as that would show bias.
That's where you get into trouble. I don't think christianity or catholocism are any less "bullshit scam" than scientology. Those scams have just been around longer.
I was noting that the pieces the civilians had a choice in was still burning fossil fuels.
The french government owns their power company. They don't seem to be making much money either. I'm just saying they don't have to concern themselves with profit like US companies do. It's an unfair comparison.
not a gas at standard temp and pressure like CO2, so isn't going to leach out
I have to ask the question. If it's currently stored relatively well in coal and oil reserves, why assume it cannot be stored permanently? Obviously it *can* be stored at standard temp, that's where we're getting it from. It seems relatively harmless to try and see if we can remove one of the biggest negatives to this form of energy. It is still the cheapest after all. Further if we have to store waste anyway I have a hard time viewing either as better than the other. Assuming we can't stop slight leaking of the co2 ever, then that is a minus. But if catastrophe strikes the co2 deposite it would be significantly less severe than the nuclear.
It's folly to assume that accidents won't happen.
it's nothing to be frightened about. Nuclear power != atomic bombs
Let's be clear, I think nuclear energy is great. It's relatively clean and unfortunate that we have such a phobia of it in America. Most our problems with it in this country come from the fact that the people are against it. Energy producers want to sell me energy. We pass laws limiting their ability to do it profitably with nuclear, then accuse them of lobbying to protect burning the fossil fuels. Again they are in the business of selling energy, not burning coal. If they could do that profitably with nuclear they would. That doesn't reflect reality today.
The absolute best thing we could do to promote this is make it economically advantageous to energy companies. That would alter things more than anything else.
This is not the fault of the energy companies or the US government. It's ours. We don't want anyone building nuclear reactors near our homes. We don't want any inconveniences in the form of conservation. We do want lots and lots of energy. The only realistic option left to us is fossil-fuels.
Maybe in 100 years we'll work out fusion and this whole problem will become mute.
I can't say I'm too concerned about having to store a few cubic metres of Uranium a year
So burning fossil fuels to *maybe* increase temperature up to 10 degrees over the next hundred years bad. Leaving out children lots of highly reactive nuclear waste that has to be stored and monitored good. Is that it? Either way you are getting your energy today and leaving the mess to them.
it's not really that difficult and it's certainly not risky.
Definitely not risky. That's why we're spending all this time and money trying to figure out a way to reliably store it for a century or more. Because we thought it would be fun.
take a look at France's energy production
I tried really hard to find something reliable to support your numbers. The best I found was 50% from nuclear power, and that they are a huge importer of energy and oil. They had big contracts in Iraq before the beginning of the war. From what I can tell if they weren't burning the fossil fuels themselves they were paying others to do it for them.
Even if that wasn't true, they have the highest income tax rate in the EU. The government basically forced them to upgrade, regardless of cost. In the US we don't do that. Market forces determine that for us. We currently don't pay for what we spend anyway, where do we get the extra money for this?
It can be done - we're just too scared to do it
Scared of what? Seriously. No one is scared of anything. We're scared of cheap, guilt-free, energy? We don't exploit one of our largest available natural resources (Alaska) because we want to preserve the animals there. We go out of our way to do things that are impractical and costly just because we think it's the right thing to do. Clearly we don't mind spending a few bucks to save the planet.
well, that and the fact that the coal industry is a very powerful lobby group
*sigh*
Yes, and everyone who makes money MUST be evil biggots out to destroy the human race. Ever occur to you they are currently the richest because they have the cheapest most reliable energy source? Drive in a car, fly in a plane, go out on a boat. Buy goods built and shipped by fossil fuels. Eat food grown using modern farm equipment also powered by them. All those things paid them. If they are evil, what are the people who are supporting them? They currently, and for the last century, have provided the human race with almost all the things we have come to take for granted.
one of the most stupid ideas every dreamt up: underground CO2 sequestration
Let's follow the logic. We find easy, cheap, energy and begin using it. Later we discover it's altering the co2 levels in our atmosphere, and scientists predict global warming as a consequence. Rather than wasting all the time and energy to replace an entire system that took over a century and trillions of dollars to build, they propose maybe we can spend a little extra and just remove the co2 from the air.
If we can do it, why is that stupid? It solves your complaint doesn't it? Storing nuclear waste for eons is sound, but storing harmless co2 isn't?
The thing that worries me is that most people seem to think that if they deny that there's a problem long enough, it'll magically go away.
The thing that worries me is people seem to believe money just magically appears. They seem to believe that anything eco-minded should be exempt from simple cost/benefit analysis. They seem to believe there is some evil conspiracy that makes the energy business shy away from all these cheap and easy energy sources because they get off on burning fossil fuels.
Please.
If someone could make these other sources cost-competitive the energy industry would hop on it in a heart-beat. They'd make more money and get good press all at the same time. They are in the business of providing the world with energy, not burning coal. I can't help but notice none of these eco-groups have managed to create viable energy businesses, and everyone involved in actually supplying my power think we need the fossil fuels.
It's because we don't purify it to a level that it would react properly. Weapons grade is the same stuff, it's just been processed more. If we processed reactor fuel to be weapons grade it would have a lot less waste. We currently have laws against that, precisely because it could be used to create weapons grade material.
As for its toxic nature, well, after a few hundred years it's no more toxic than natural deposits of Uranium.
All of which should count against you. You have to build and maintain facilities to hold it for at least 100 years. Then find a place to move it more permanently. All that took energy, mostly using vehicles burning fossil-fuels.
You do realise that there's radioactivity floating around everywhere
Yes. We also add more when we burn fossil fuels. It's easier when you dillute it in our atmosphere though, then store it in warehouses that need ongoing maintenance. It's not perfect, obviously, but it's more efficient right now.
Our Earth's Uranium deposits are quite happily decaying even as we speak - we might as well make use of that process!
With a half-life measured in billions of years I'm not that worried. When we need it, it will be there.
Hopefully you don't want kids either, is all I can say. This whole thing sickens me.
Yes. Undoubtedly human kind is just going to toss in the towel if the temperature maintains a.1 degree average increase over the next 100 years; and that's the extreme case. Most scientists disagree the change will be that high. Leaving alone all the other changes that could occur in a century to alter this process.
We can do something today; consume less energy and spend lots on R&D for new energy forms. But that's not what we want. We want lots of guilt-free, cheap, energy today. We want to spout how terrible fossil fuels are, as we burn more every year than the year before.
It's like battered-wife syndrome. If the guy keeps telling her how bad he feels, and then proceeds to beat her anyway, how bad do you think he really feels?
Even if there wasn't a clear correlation with an increase in global temperature
I think it's pretty clear there is a correlation. It's also clear that it's not the most important factor.
do I have to spell it out completely??
What is your proposition? All of our current forms of energy have their drawbacks. Fossil fuels are really cheap, easy to transport and store, and currently still available. We don't purify our nuclear fuel much for fear of weaponization, which means it leaves us with amazing amounts of extremely toxic, long lasting, waste. Solar, wind, and water power either don't scale well or are very expensive to get.
Our experience also shows us people would rather burn fossil fuel than see a wind farm out their backdoor (which seems pretty messed up to me).
It seems the best way to approach this in the immediate future is to talk about conservation, but no one wants to do that. Your average American wants to save the planet, but not if it means skipping on that flight to the global warming summit.
That's great. But it's the exception, not the norm.
I am telecommuting 2-3 days a week to avoid driving in to the office.
I telecommute 5 days a week. I fill my car up, maybe, once a month. Every single person I know however, drives to work 5 days a week. Telecommuting is the exception in America today.
you said "no one" here acts on their beliefs, not "many people"
You're being a little too literal. I could find "many people" who think just about anything. By "no one" I meant "most people".
Until California
I know many Californians, and there are many of you. But my experience in living all over the country is that CA is not really a valid sample to draw your politically charged stats from. You guys are exceptionally environmentally conscious compared to any other place I've ever lived. While I think that's partially great, I also think you often take it a bit far.
Your extremely aggressive response being an example.
Hint: there were waiting lists before the recent jump in fuel prices, too.
Again, in CA. CA is also the only place I ever lived where people would seriously make house purchasing decisions based on whether there was PVC pipping in the house or not. Up until fuel prices changed a very small percentage of cars sold in this country were hybrid. Most of those were in CA as you guys have the most aggressive attitude towards them.
Hybrid cars are heavily subsidized by my tax dollars. They are also filled with things like batteries that go bad every few years and must be replaced, leaving us with lots of extra waste a regular car wouldn't have produced. Regular automobiles are far more economically($$) sound.
My point is that there is a lot of things we as a country could do differently to produce less co2, but don't because it's easier not to.
You put solar panels on your roof, but you have the extra income, technical know-how, and motivation to do so. I notice you didn't decide to consume less electricity, just change where you got it from. We don't produce anywhere near enough solar panels to provide everyone with what you have. Most families probably couldn't afford it today, let alone with mass demand. There's also the sticky problem of how much fossil fuel we burn, and waste we create, to make the panels in the first place. They didn't just magically appear.
Ultimately you have the right idea though. Rather than attempting to engage everyone in trying to spend billions of dollars to curb something that may happen 100 years down the road, running around screaming "the earth is dying!"; instead encourage solar energy, nuclear energy, telecommuting, and more effieicent (non-suv) vehicles. It will reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn until a solid replacement is found.
We all need the energy we get from fossil fuels. It's cheap, pleantiful, and easy to transport. We couldn't begin to produce the energy we use today with solar panels. But as long as we keep working on it we might. I expect that in the next 100 years we will discover a better, cleaner, cheaper form of energy. At which time the whole problem will start to eb anyway. It's not as if we have to do this now or never.
it's too late to avert serious damage (both generally and economically)
I live in Florida. I've been hit twice in 2 years by a hurricane. I could make a much better argument for the need to do something about disrupting hurricanes that cause billions of dollars of damage every year. We aren't doing much about it though. It's cheaper and easier to respond to the situations as they occur, rather than spend billions on situations that might occur. Imagine spending billions to hurricane proof all our buildings, then have them flood with rising sea water, or some other natural disaster. It's just wasteful.
Are you saying that a 5 degree temperature average change over the entire globe, over the span of 100 years, is going to doom human beings to destruction? I seriously doubt it. We can build walls to hold back the ocean against a sinking city. We'll figure out a way to get by.
My favorite part is no one in the US seems to want to actually deal with the consequences of their beleifs. Most claim they want to do something about global warming, until it means I can't fly to Tahiti this summer. Americans are consuming more gas than ever. How can I take your argument seriously then?
People all fly to places on the planet to have summits about global warming. In the day and age of the internet, rather than try to minimize their impact, they burn ungodly amounts of fossil fuel to sit in the same room and talk about how burning fossil fuel is going to doom us all?
We all buy big-screen tv's, suv's, go on long summer road trips. We all drive to work every day, when telecommuting would do for most of us. Our attitude doesn't suggest to me most people take this all that seriously.
Sure we want to pollute less, but not if it means I can't have something. There are so many things we could do to help the situation and simply don't do because it's inconvenient. Don't ask me for billions of my tax dollars to fix a problem that we could all easily help with a little effort.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but the last time it happened the dominant life form wasn't industrialised and happily stuffing the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses...
That doesn't make you question all this a little? The first thing I thought when reading the article was what about 401 years ago? Why was that as hot? Clearly there are other factors besides carbon dioxide that effect global temperatures.
Hurricanes happen every year. Yet we don't seem to be putting much effort into figuring out a way to break them up before they reach us. Why? Why not spend money on a real problem that effects us every year as opposed to some hypothetical one that may effect our children?
But what I want to know is why so many people seem to think that this makes it stupid to spend that money.
It's just simple risk assesment. The chances of me getting sick or in a car accident are way higher than being struck by lightning in my living room. It's why I haven't installed a lightning rod on my roof. The risk is so negligable that it doesn't warrant me responding with the money and energy to put a lightning rod up there. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
Global warming, if true, probably won't wipe out life on earth
It used to be warm enough that antarctica was home to dinosaurs. I'd say that's a really safe bet.
Now, yes, fighting global warming would cost money, money which would be wasted if it turned out not to be true after all.
That's the gist of it. I think I could easily argue at this point that the value of fossil-based energy to us drasticaly over-shadows the need to worry about this. If temperatures are indeed going to rise the full 10 degrees (that not everyone agrees with) over the next century we have lots of time to respond to it.
We don't build tornado-proof houses in tornado alley. Tornados are proven to exist and happen there all the time. Spending that amount of energy and resources on something like that now is just wasteful. If one comes we will rebuild after. If they started occuring frequently in an area we would either leave, or build structures that could withstand it.
The US is currently running a huge deficit. I'm recommending that we drastically increase your taxes so that we can pay for what we are spending now. After you start paying that I would consider talking with you about increasing it further to pay to stave off some natural disasters, that may or may not happen in your lifetime if at all.
It's not like it's act now or we can do nothing later. If serious problems start to develop it will move the risk to a position where it does make economical sense to respond to it and do something. When New Orleans started to sink we responded. We are very felxible and inventive.
Stimulant abuse beyond caffeine really isn't very sustainable.
Why not? If caffeine use is sustainable, why aren't other things as well? Have you tried any of them? The bigger problem with sustained use is your body adjusts with all drugs, just like caffeine. You need to take more and more to continue to see the same effect. Even then, you never really see the same "high" you did the first few times you take something; caffeine included. One can of coke used to be able to send me through the roof. Now I can chug coffee like nobodies business.
I know several people who have been taking adderall for years. They seem to be fine, and are actually very successful people.
a career programmer simply couldn't sustain it.
I disagree. I think this is a way of altering your body to do tasks that are otherwise unnatrual. We remove wisdom teeth, the appendix, and tonsils for the same reasons. The body in it's current form was evolved for different functions than what we apply it to today. Your brain just wasn't designed to sit in an office for 8+ hours a day and focus on a little screen. To me drugs of this nature are like surgery to remove unwanted organs.
Stimulant addictions will mess you up pretty bad.
Again, just about everyone deals with at least mild caffeine addiction and we're all fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of using drugs to alter one's chemistry. The worse part of illegal drug addiction is that it is so expensive/hard to get. If you could buy speed at the drug store for $.99 a pop no one would need to rob to get it. When's the last time you heard of someone stealing from grandma to pay for their adderall script?
All drugs can be dangerous. Small amounts of caffeine are actually very lethal. What is important is to educate everyone about the benefits and consequences (if/how they apply). Education about sex and drugs in America is something we do with amazing ineptitude. I don't think you could get worse policies and results if you went out looking to create them.
It's actually a very interesting experience. I have a job that I love, but occasionally I get my hands on some adderall and I take it on my way to work.
Adderall days I accomplish 2-3 days worth of non-adderall work. You are like a machine. I can work for 12 hours without eating or drinking. Whatever you point your brain at becomes so engrossing that just nothing else matters, and you can point it at anything at all.
It often makes me wonder if there are other people that can switch into something like that naturally (maybe I have slight ADD myself? or maybe it's bs and the difference is I was forced to learn to calm myself down and focus on something, where others weren't?). Maybe all that seperated average joe from 1337 scientist was he was capable of focusing like that.
I also couldn't imagine being like that all the time. I couldn't be like that everyday; after one I feel mentally exhausted.
Adderall is what caffeine wanted to be. The downside for me is that I don't really enjoy caffeine anymore. It makes you jittery and prevents you from being tired, more than it actually increases the quality of the time you are on it.
It's math. There are pros and cons. Not each pro and con is weighted evenly. The differences of opinion becomes how much weight we assign to each one. For the most part we can all agree what the issues are. We just differ in the degree of importance we assign each one. At the end our brain sums up the sides and choses the one that has the greatest value.
What is the numerical 'value' of a person?
Compared to what? This math is relative; the value changes given the situation. Normally I would agree we should go out of our way to preserve human life whenever possible. So should we pull out of Iraq now whenever a terrorist organization over there takes an american hostage? Of course not. Because many more people would suffer as a consequence than the few that were captured. Should we tear apart a multi-million dollar building to save a child captured in some small space? Most would agree absolutely (except maybe the insurance adjuster, who values the child at much less than his multi-million dollar policy).
What if we could take an infant's life to save the productive adult's?
Nearly all of us would agree that is crossing the line. We aren't arguing about some chemical bath now. Especially once you gain consciousness you are protected. My definition of human would clearly cover an infant.
they do not make you less valuable as a person
Because you haven't decided what the definition of a valuable person is. It may sound cold, but if I had to choose to sacrifice a brain dead person to give their organs to a dozen other people and save their lives, I would. I don't view their values as being the same. I hope that if someday I am pronounced brain dead, someone will use my organs to help others who need them. Not that looking stupid on national TV wouldn't be fun.
Judging us by our usefulness is a scary proposition to me.
I think you undersell yourself. We are all judged and judge everyday. Our friends, lovers, employers and even family (who have an insanely high threshold) constantly evaluate our worth. Try becoming a homeless heroin addict and see if everyone still treats you the same.
It's good to value human life, but we pass judgement on who gets to live and die everyday. We easily enough decided that the value of making a democratic Iraq was worth thousands of our lives, tens-of-thousands of theirs, and billions of dollars. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Just that we knew going in some of us would die over some abstract ideal for other people, and we chose it anyway.
I know just how useless I am. Heck, I've just spend two days discussing morality on slashdot,
I shut off my wow account a couple weeks ago. It's unbelievable how much time I have now:P
but neither of us could venture a credible quantification of why it's wrong.
Sure we could. There are lots of perfectly valid society-based reasons. Top of the list being I don't want someone to kill me. I don't not kill people only because I've been told it's wrong. I didn't wait until marraige to have sex, even though I was told that was wrong. My equation realised that one was a big deal, the other wasn't.
my assumption is that rights should be granted at conception,
I'm asking deeper than that. Why? What happens at conception that makes it more valuable than a sperm, more valuable than a fully grown animal, and more valuable than a fully grown human? What if, like live-stock, the process only got started for the sole purpose of farming stem-cells. This never would have started if I didn't intend to go through this process. This was never going to be a child. It's nothing but some funky shaped molecular chemicals floating in a container.
So why do we afford no protection for sperm and eggs, but protection for the first cell created after the 2 combine? In reality it is nothing but the 2 cells joined. 4 is still just 2 added to 2. It's not so much the cells as the circumstances around them that will allow them to actually become a child.
True enough, but there are laws of physics at work that we can dissect and quantify with a thrown object, not so with the morality of murder.
Exactly, which is why the process is somewhat bastardised. This hardware was never meant to help you evaluate the morality of murder. It was designed to help you make quick, fairly accurate, decisions without having to think about it, then act on those intuitions with conviction.
That helps you get food and fight competition. When you let that same wiring rule your moral system you get an inflated sense of your values validity because you haven't brought the conscious, more intelligent equations, into the mix.
Many of us arrive at this feeling, then use the conscious part to go looking for reasons and evidence to support our feeling. Ignoring or trivializing any information that contradicts it. This is not what this part of the brain was designed for. We should be making moral choices higher up in the brain than the part that tells me to swerve to miss the tree.
At its core, rational discourse assumes that both parties are entering honestly and willing to concede to evidence presented.
Which cannot happen if you want to blanket assume that our feelings on what conception is are untouchable. Scientists would like to know this too. Many of us can't see the argument that you are a whole human at conception. It just doesn't make sense to us. We define the things that make us human being our minds (IQ), not necessarily the way we look. Embryos are a cell. Embryos have no braincells, no nervous system, no sense of self. Why can't I use those cells to help a fully functional adult?
You can't debate it if you can't define what it is that makes something human. Concrete list of conditions and situations. The hard part for this gets to be that you have to keep evaluating this list of rules against other things. Sometimes one life is actually more important than another. If sacrificing one person could save a million, that might be worth it. Maybe we should worry more about the death and murder that happens to adults every day, as opposed to the cells we never allowed to become infants.
In a situation where this person will definitely die if we don't use a stem cell, why is an artificially fertilized and cultivated cell more valuable than the man sitting before me? By everyone's definition he is alive.
I think you are levying against me some resentment you have about fundamentalists.
I apologise if it comes off this way. I'm just trying to discuss it. No harm intended.
some of my claims are faith-based and cannot be proved or disproved
Therein lies the problem. Everyone has a different code. Even if the majority was on your side, that doesn't make it right. If you can't quantify and explain it, it has no place being turned to law.
The real quntification occurs with determining liabilty, not morality.
My argument was that liability is the balancer. When you commit some act we use liability to make you "pay" for it. It's supposed to balance the equation back out.
I think you are using quantify to mean clarify.Their is no numerical analysis that tells me not to kill someone for a minor slight. Instead, there is an innate sense of scale, that can't be quantified, but can be qualified, that helps direct me toward an appropriate response.
No I mean quantify. When someone throws a ball at you, you don't consciously mathmatically work out the velocity of the ball, factor in gravity, and determine where the ball will be when it reaches you. You have special equation hardware that does it for you, and hands the information back as an instinct, otherwise you couldn't catch a ball. This is the same. The equations are back there, your brain is just doing what it does best, estimating. It quickly takes in all you know and does some quick equations on it, like catching the ball. It's fast and usually accurate enough to get the job done.
If you had to work this out consciously the prey would get away/ball would hit you/couldn't react to the potential car accident/etc.
Feelings are just that. In this case there are a chain of feelings.
For me lots of the work is trying to figure out exactly why I feel the way I feel on a topic. Then deciding if consciously I agree with the way this process happened. Sometimes I don't, and I change it.
The difference between us in this argument I really believe is the way we weighted the individual variables and decisions up to and including this point. Both are valid as our life experiences have moved them. If we begin to acknowledge that feelings aren't unchangeable sacred things, but just differences of opinion, it seems we could work things out rationally.
I don't think anything about us is unquantifiable.
You're never been with someone when they found out they were pregnant, have you?
Yes I have. It was more like 4 weeks, not 8. That you and I know the menstruation cycle still doesn't make that what the passage said. You still made the 8 week thing up. It was not stated anywhere. Maybe they meant 4 months. I'm guessing a stem cell, which is way short of 8 weeks would not meet your cut-off. Forgetting that the passage had nothing to do with abortion at all anyway.
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When they tried to start rolling out these new cd's they didn't work in lots of unintended places (like cars), and this mostly led to them to be seemingly phased back out (i admit i haven't bought a cd in years though, so maybe i'm just not hearing about it anymore because no one else is either).
So my question: is this different? I would think the same laws of economics would mean just about every dvd player was following the same basic idea. Use 1 basic drive guts everywhere to drive the prices way down. Which means lots of genuine uses (like regular dvd players) would stop working, hence driving it away again. Is this not the case? If not does anyone know why this happened in the cd world but not dvd?
When has a reduced production price ever made this industry lower it's prices? Doesn't that actually mean the prices go up?
It looks awesome.
I think they've managed to cross the line finally. All the early adopters, who are your bread and butter, are getting shafted. I'm not going out to buy another big flat TV, and upgrade my media center hardware, for a slightly better picture. My current setup plays the hd content I download just fine.
I'm not going to throw away my car stereo for some slightly better sounding tunes. I'm not tossing out everything I have now for this monster. I mean it will downsample to dvd quality on all my hardware anyway, so there really is no benefit to the end user. Mom and pop will see a DVD player for $50 and a hd-whatever for $500+ and just get the DVD. The early adopters who drive this sort of switch anyway are all left scratching their heads.
They needed to make the offer very compelling for us all to switch, and they've just failed on every level to do that.
Such a fine word.
So you get to decide which reasons are valid and which ones aren't?
Slightly curde; it does many other things. Regardless, christian dogma has little to do with the modern form of morality/laws our government practices. In the US most of the social advances in society came at a time when society walked away from the christian norm at the time.
Since the majority of the population of the United States is Christian, it seems perfectly appropriate that our elected representatives reflect a Christian morality
Also crude. The problem is what IS a christian morality? So many different sects and so many different beliefs. The secret is figuring out what should be a personal moral choice and what negatively affects the rest of us. No meat on Friday is practiced by some. It's a peronal moral choice, and if a representative took office it is within his rights to continue practicing that. He/she should also be free to go out in his spare time and encourage others to join him/her in that belief. I'm not sure that means he should start creating legistlation forcing the rest of us to do the same.
We practice this give and take everyday in every aspect of society. Religion is inherently intolerant of such leniency. Which is why it doesn't belong in government.
If you think that the government should be entirely devoid of morality
Actually what you are presecribing is anarchy. "Moral" to a government or business is what the law says it can do. You can't go around subjecting them to everyone's whim about what moral is. Nothing would ever be moral to 100% of people. We have laws to define larger social morality. Your personal morality can be whatever you want, but if it violates the larger societal moral code we will come after you.
You missed the point of the argument. If it's ok for 1 group to go around enouraging belief in magical things with no concrete evidence, why is it not equally ok for others to go around spreading the idea that we shouldn't be basing our moral prinicples on magical ideologies?
If they believe this, then is it not a theological statement?
Not everything is religious. If I believe that atoms exist, even having not seen one, I can read and use tests to try and support this belief. Since no evidence can be presented to prove that a all powerful diety exists, it is fair to assume there isn't one. That's not theology, it's just simple logic.
evidence collected in the real world does not necessarily agree with it. Consider this: how many people were killed as a result of the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist regimes in the last 100 years?
The evidence doesn't necessarily oppose it either. None of your killers claimed to be atheists. Nazi beliefs are very similar to religious ones. They touted belief in a system that could not be supported with any facts, preferring to go after people who opposed them, rather than argue the facts.
Why stop at 100 years? There were crusades. We burned women as witches. Different religious groups have gone to war over the holy-lands over the years. Muslims blow themselves up to get us nasty non-islamics. Scientists of many different principles were denounced and threatened with death because their verifiable facts disputed the held beliefs. All for what? Some magical belief in an unverifiable deity.
Atheists want to rock that boat. How are they supposed to respect that?
More recently we have abortion. Why should abortion be illegal? Because these groups "feel" it's wrong. Why? Well they go take a few out-of-context quotes from a document heavily edited and created thousands of years ago to support their opinion. You can't argue with that kind of crazy.
"political ideology" is far more dangerous than "religion"
From an atheist perspective there is no difference between the two. They both behave the same, and inherently have only their own self-interest at heart. The most unimaginable wickedness the world has ever seen was always born from 1 of the 2. If you don't have verifiable evidence to support your opinion it has no place being policy of any kind. Either religious or political.
There is a difference between (crazy) personal beliefs, and attempting to impose your (crazy) personal beliefs upon others.
Why is it crazy to attempt to change people's minds for what one sees as better? Your religious types try to appeal to a high-ground type of morality, backed by an all powerful deity. Atheists are usually spouting their opinions about not believing in non-verifiable dogma that empowers those that push it.
I would like to start taking 1.3% of your income. Not wanting to give it to me is a "terrible" reason to withdraw from this offer. How would you like to set this up?
In practice what it means is you cannot fund any religions, as that would show bias.
That's where you get into trouble. I don't think christianity or catholocism are any less "bullshit scam" than scientology. Those scams have just been around longer.
I was noting that the pieces the civilians had a choice in was still burning fossil fuels.
The french government owns their power company. They don't seem to be making much money either. I'm just saying they don't have to concern themselves with profit like US companies do. It's an unfair comparison.
not a gas at standard temp and pressure like CO2, so isn't going to leach out
I have to ask the question. If it's currently stored relatively well in coal and oil reserves, why assume it cannot be stored permanently? Obviously it *can* be stored at standard temp, that's where we're getting it from. It seems relatively harmless to try and see if we can remove one of the biggest negatives to this form of energy. It is still the cheapest after all. Further if we have to store waste anyway I have a hard time viewing either as better than the other. Assuming we can't stop slight leaking of the co2 ever, then that is a minus. But if catastrophe strikes the co2 deposite it would be significantly less severe than the nuclear.
It's folly to assume that accidents won't happen.
it's nothing to be frightened about. Nuclear power != atomic bombs
Let's be clear, I think nuclear energy is great. It's relatively clean and unfortunate that we have such a phobia of it in America. Most our problems with it in this country come from the fact that the people are against it. Energy producers want to sell me energy. We pass laws limiting their ability to do it profitably with nuclear, then accuse them of lobbying to protect burning the fossil fuels. Again they are in the business of selling energy, not burning coal. If they could do that profitably with nuclear they would. That doesn't reflect reality today.
The absolute best thing we could do to promote this is make it economically advantageous to energy companies. That would alter things more than anything else.
This is not the fault of the energy companies or the US government. It's ours. We don't want anyone building nuclear reactors near our homes. We don't want any inconveniences in the form of conservation. We do want lots and lots of energy. The only realistic option left to us is fossil-fuels.
Maybe in 100 years we'll work out fusion and this whole problem will become mute.
So burning fossil fuels to *maybe* increase temperature up to 10 degrees over the next hundred years bad. Leaving out children lots of highly reactive nuclear waste that has to be stored and monitored good. Is that it? Either way you are getting your energy today and leaving the mess to them.
it's not really that difficult and it's certainly not risky.
Definitely not risky. That's why we're spending all this time and money trying to figure out a way to reliably store it for a century or more. Because we thought it would be fun.
take a look at France's energy production
I tried really hard to find something reliable to support your numbers. The best I found was 50% from nuclear power, and that they are a huge importer of energy and oil. They had big contracts in Iraq before the beginning of the war. From what I can tell if they weren't burning the fossil fuels themselves they were paying others to do it for them.
Even if that wasn't true, they have the highest income tax rate in the EU. The government basically forced them to upgrade, regardless of cost. In the US we don't do that. Market forces determine that for us. We currently don't pay for what we spend anyway, where do we get the extra money for this?
It can be done - we're just too scared to do it
Scared of what? Seriously. No one is scared of anything. We're scared of cheap, guilt-free, energy? We don't exploit one of our largest available natural resources (Alaska) because we want to preserve the animals there. We go out of our way to do things that are impractical and costly just because we think it's the right thing to do. Clearly we don't mind spending a few bucks to save the planet.
well, that and the fact that the coal industry is a very powerful lobby group
*sigh*
Yes, and everyone who makes money MUST be evil biggots out to destroy the human race. Ever occur to you they are currently the richest because they have the cheapest most reliable energy source? Drive in a car, fly in a plane, go out on a boat. Buy goods built and shipped by fossil fuels. Eat food grown using modern farm equipment also powered by them. All those things paid them. If they are evil, what are the people who are supporting them? They currently, and for the last century, have provided the human race with almost all the things we have come to take for granted.
one of the most stupid ideas every dreamt up: underground CO2 sequestration
Let's follow the logic. We find easy, cheap, energy and begin using it. Later we discover it's altering the co2 levels in our atmosphere, and scientists predict global warming as a consequence. Rather than wasting all the time and energy to replace an entire system that took over a century and trillions of dollars to build, they propose maybe we can spend a little extra and just remove the co2 from the air.
If we can do it, why is that stupid? It solves your complaint doesn't it? Storing nuclear waste for eons is sound, but storing harmless co2 isn't?
The thing that worries me is that most people seem to think that if they deny that there's a problem long enough, it'll magically go away.
The thing that worries me is people seem to believe money just magically appears. They seem to believe that anything eco-minded should be exempt from simple cost/benefit analysis. They seem to believe there is some evil conspiracy that makes the energy business shy away from all these cheap and easy energy sources because they get off on burning fossil fuels.
Please.
If someone could make these other sources cost-competitive the energy industry would hop on it in a heart-beat. They'd make more money and get good press all at the same time. They are in the business of providing the world with energy, not burning coal. I can't help but notice none of these eco-groups have managed to create viable energy businesses, and everyone involved in actually supplying my power think we need the fossil fuels.
It's because we don't purify it to a level that it would react properly. Weapons grade is the same stuff, it's just been processed more. If we processed reactor fuel to be weapons grade it would have a lot less waste. We currently have laws against that, precisely because it could be used to create weapons grade material.
As for its toxic nature, well, after a few hundred years it's no more toxic than natural deposits of Uranium.
All of which should count against you. You have to build and maintain facilities to hold it for at least 100 years. Then find a place to move it more permanently. All that took energy, mostly using vehicles burning fossil-fuels.
You do realise that there's radioactivity floating around everywhere
Yes. We also add more when we burn fossil fuels. It's easier when you dillute it in our atmosphere though, then store it in warehouses that need ongoing maintenance. It's not perfect, obviously, but it's more efficient right now.
Our Earth's Uranium deposits are quite happily decaying even as we speak - we might as well make use of that process!
With a half-life measured in billions of years I'm not that worried. When we need it, it will be there.
Hopefully you don't want kids either, is all I can say. This whole thing sickens me.
Yes. Undoubtedly human kind is just going to toss in the towel if the temperature maintains a .1 degree average increase over the next 100 years; and that's the extreme case. Most scientists disagree the change will be that high. Leaving alone all the other changes that could occur in a century to alter this process.
We can do something today; consume less energy and spend lots on R&D for new energy forms. But that's not what we want. We want lots of guilt-free, cheap, energy today. We want to spout how terrible fossil fuels are, as we burn more every year than the year before.
It's like battered-wife syndrome. If the guy keeps telling her how bad he feels, and then proceeds to beat her anyway, how bad do you think he really feels?
I think it's pretty clear there is a correlation. It's also clear that it's not the most important factor.
do I have to spell it out completely??
What is your proposition? All of our current forms of energy have their drawbacks. Fossil fuels are really cheap, easy to transport and store, and currently still available. We don't purify our nuclear fuel much for fear of weaponization, which means it leaves us with amazing amounts of extremely toxic, long lasting, waste. Solar, wind, and water power either don't scale well or are very expensive to get.
Our experience also shows us people would rather burn fossil fuel than see a wind farm out their backdoor (which seems pretty messed up to me).
It seems the best way to approach this in the immediate future is to talk about conservation, but no one wants to do that. Your average American wants to save the planet, but not if it means skipping on that flight to the global warming summit.
That's great. But it's the exception, not the norm.
I am telecommuting 2-3 days a week to avoid driving in to the office.
I telecommute 5 days a week. I fill my car up, maybe, once a month. Every single person I know however, drives to work 5 days a week. Telecommuting is the exception in America today.
you said "no one" here acts on their beliefs, not "many people"
You're being a little too literal. I could find "many people" who think just about anything. By "no one" I meant "most people".
Until California
I know many Californians, and there are many of you. But my experience in living all over the country is that CA is not really a valid sample to draw your politically charged stats from. You guys are exceptionally environmentally conscious compared to any other place I've ever lived. While I think that's partially great, I also think you often take it a bit far.
Your extremely aggressive response being an example.
Hint: there were waiting lists before the recent jump in fuel prices, too.
Again, in CA. CA is also the only place I ever lived where people would seriously make house purchasing decisions based on whether there was PVC pipping in the house or not. Up until fuel prices changed a very small percentage of cars sold in this country were hybrid. Most of those were in CA as you guys have the most aggressive attitude towards them.
Hybrid cars are heavily subsidized by my tax dollars. They are also filled with things like batteries that go bad every few years and must be replaced, leaving us with lots of extra waste a regular car wouldn't have produced. Regular automobiles are far more economically($$) sound.
My point is that there is a lot of things we as a country could do differently to produce less co2, but don't because it's easier not to.
You put solar panels on your roof, but you have the extra income, technical know-how, and motivation to do so. I notice you didn't decide to consume less electricity, just change where you got it from. We don't produce anywhere near enough solar panels to provide everyone with what you have. Most families probably couldn't afford it today, let alone with mass demand. There's also the sticky problem of how much fossil fuel we burn, and waste we create, to make the panels in the first place. They didn't just magically appear.
Ultimately you have the right idea though. Rather than attempting to engage everyone in trying to spend billions of dollars to curb something that may happen 100 years down the road, running around screaming "the earth is dying!"; instead encourage solar energy, nuclear energy, telecommuting, and more effieicent (non-suv) vehicles. It will reduce the amount of fossil fuel we burn until a solid replacement is found.
We all need the energy we get from fossil fuels. It's cheap, pleantiful, and easy to transport. We couldn't begin to produce the energy we use today with solar panels. But as long as we keep working on it we might. I expect that in the next 100 years we will discover a better, cleaner, cheaper form of energy. At which time the whole problem will start to eb anyway. It's not as if we have to do this now or never.
Even then there's always air-conditioning :p
I live in Florida. I've been hit twice in 2 years by a hurricane. I could make a much better argument for the need to do something about disrupting hurricanes that cause billions of dollars of damage every year. We aren't doing much about it though. It's cheaper and easier to respond to the situations as they occur, rather than spend billions on situations that might occur. Imagine spending billions to hurricane proof all our buildings, then have them flood with rising sea water, or some other natural disaster. It's just wasteful.
Are you saying that a 5 degree temperature average change over the entire globe, over the span of 100 years, is going to doom human beings to destruction? I seriously doubt it. We can build walls to hold back the ocean against a sinking city. We'll figure out a way to get by.
My favorite part is no one in the US seems to want to actually deal with the consequences of their beleifs. Most claim they want to do something about global warming, until it means I can't fly to Tahiti this summer. Americans are consuming more gas than ever. How can I take your argument seriously then?
People all fly to places on the planet to have summits about global warming. In the day and age of the internet, rather than try to minimize their impact, they burn ungodly amounts of fossil fuel to sit in the same room and talk about how burning fossil fuel is going to doom us all?
We all buy big-screen tv's, suv's, go on long summer road trips. We all drive to work every day, when telecommuting would do for most of us. Our attitude doesn't suggest to me most people take this all that seriously.
Sure we want to pollute less, but not if it means I can't have something. There are so many things we could do to help the situation and simply don't do because it's inconvenient. Don't ask me for billions of my tax dollars to fix a problem that we could all easily help with a little effort.
That doesn't make you question all this a little? The first thing I thought when reading the article was what about 401 years ago? Why was that as hot? Clearly there are other factors besides carbon dioxide that effect global temperatures.
Hurricanes happen every year. Yet we don't seem to be putting much effort into figuring out a way to break them up before they reach us. Why? Why not spend money on a real problem that effects us every year as opposed to some hypothetical one that may effect our children?
It's just simple risk assesment. The chances of me getting sick or in a car accident are way higher than being struck by lightning in my living room. It's why I haven't installed a lightning rod on my roof. The risk is so negligable that it doesn't warrant me responding with the money and energy to put a lightning rod up there. Doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
Global warming, if true, probably won't wipe out life on earth
It used to be warm enough that antarctica was home to dinosaurs. I'd say that's a really safe bet.
Now, yes, fighting global warming would cost money, money which would be wasted if it turned out not to be true after all.
That's the gist of it. I think I could easily argue at this point that the value of fossil-based energy to us drasticaly over-shadows the need to worry about this. If temperatures are indeed going to rise the full 10 degrees (that not everyone agrees with) over the next century we have lots of time to respond to it.
We don't build tornado-proof houses in tornado alley. Tornados are proven to exist and happen there all the time. Spending that amount of energy and resources on something like that now is just wasteful. If one comes we will rebuild after. If they started occuring frequently in an area we would either leave, or build structures that could withstand it.
The US is currently running a huge deficit. I'm recommending that we drastically increase your taxes so that we can pay for what we are spending now. After you start paying that I would consider talking with you about increasing it further to pay to stave off some natural disasters, that may or may not happen in your lifetime if at all.
It's not like it's act now or we can do nothing later. If serious problems start to develop it will move the risk to a position where it does make economical sense to respond to it and do something. When New Orleans started to sink we responded. We are very felxible and inventive.
Why not? If caffeine use is sustainable, why aren't other things as well? Have you tried any of them? The bigger problem with sustained use is your body adjusts with all drugs, just like caffeine. You need to take more and more to continue to see the same effect. Even then, you never really see the same "high" you did the first few times you take something; caffeine included. One can of coke used to be able to send me through the roof. Now I can chug coffee like nobodies business.
I know several people who have been taking adderall for years. They seem to be fine, and are actually very successful people.
a career programmer simply couldn't sustain it.
I disagree. I think this is a way of altering your body to do tasks that are otherwise unnatrual. We remove wisdom teeth, the appendix, and tonsils for the same reasons. The body in it's current form was evolved for different functions than what we apply it to today. Your brain just wasn't designed to sit in an office for 8+ hours a day and focus on a little screen. To me drugs of this nature are like surgery to remove unwanted organs.
Stimulant addictions will mess you up pretty bad.
Again, just about everyone deals with at least mild caffeine addiction and we're all fine. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of using drugs to alter one's chemistry. The worse part of illegal drug addiction is that it is so expensive/hard to get. If you could buy speed at the drug store for $.99 a pop no one would need to rob to get it. When's the last time you heard of someone stealing from grandma to pay for their adderall script?
All drugs can be dangerous. Small amounts of caffeine are actually very lethal. What is important is to educate everyone about the benefits and consequences (if/how they apply). Education about sex and drugs in America is something we do with amazing ineptitude. I don't think you could get worse policies and results if you went out looking to create them.
Adderall days I accomplish 2-3 days worth of non-adderall work. You are like a machine. I can work for 12 hours without eating or drinking. Whatever you point your brain at becomes so engrossing that just nothing else matters, and you can point it at anything at all.
It often makes me wonder if there are other people that can switch into something like that naturally (maybe I have slight ADD myself? or maybe it's bs and the difference is I was forced to learn to calm myself down and focus on something, where others weren't?). Maybe all that seperated average joe from 1337 scientist was he was capable of focusing like that.
I also couldn't imagine being like that all the time. I couldn't be like that everyday; after one I feel mentally exhausted.
Adderall is what caffeine wanted to be. The downside for me is that I don't really enjoy caffeine anymore. It makes you jittery and prevents you from being tired, more than it actually increases the quality of the time you are on it.
It's math. There are pros and cons. Not each pro and con is weighted evenly. The differences of opinion becomes how much weight we assign to each one. For the most part we can all agree what the issues are. We just differ in the degree of importance we assign each one. At the end our brain sums up the sides and choses the one that has the greatest value.
What is the numerical 'value' of a person?
Compared to what? This math is relative; the value changes given the situation. Normally I would agree we should go out of our way to preserve human life whenever possible. So should we pull out of Iraq now whenever a terrorist organization over there takes an american hostage? Of course not. Because many more people would suffer as a consequence than the few that were captured. Should we tear apart a multi-million dollar building to save a child captured in some small space? Most would agree absolutely (except maybe the insurance adjuster, who values the child at much less than his multi-million dollar policy).
What if we could take an infant's life to save the productive adult's?
Nearly all of us would agree that is crossing the line. We aren't arguing about some chemical bath now. Especially once you gain consciousness you are protected. My definition of human would clearly cover an infant.
they do not make you less valuable as a person
Because you haven't decided what the definition of a valuable person is. It may sound cold, but if I had to choose to sacrifice a brain dead person to give their organs to a dozen other people and save their lives, I would. I don't view their values as being the same. I hope that if someday I am pronounced brain dead, someone will use my organs to help others who need them. Not that looking stupid on national TV wouldn't be fun.
Judging us by our usefulness is a scary proposition to me.
I think you undersell yourself. We are all judged and judge everyday. Our friends, lovers, employers and even family (who have an insanely high threshold) constantly evaluate our worth. Try becoming a homeless heroin addict and see if everyone still treats you the same.
It's good to value human life, but we pass judgement on who gets to live and die everyday. We easily enough decided that the value of making a democratic Iraq was worth thousands of our lives, tens-of-thousands of theirs, and billions of dollars. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Just that we knew going in some of us would die over some abstract ideal for other people, and we chose it anyway.
I know just how useless I am. Heck, I've just spend two days discussing morality on slashdot,
I shut off my wow account a couple weeks ago. It's unbelievable how much time I have now :P
Sure we could. There are lots of perfectly valid society-based reasons. Top of the list being I don't want someone to kill me. I don't not kill people only because I've been told it's wrong. I didn't wait until marraige to have sex, even though I was told that was wrong. My equation realised that one was a big deal, the other wasn't.
my assumption is that rights should be granted at conception,
I'm asking deeper than that. Why? What happens at conception that makes it more valuable than a sperm, more valuable than a fully grown animal, and more valuable than a fully grown human? What if, like live-stock, the process only got started for the sole purpose of farming stem-cells. This never would have started if I didn't intend to go through this process. This was never going to be a child. It's nothing but some funky shaped molecular chemicals floating in a container.
So why do we afford no protection for sperm and eggs, but protection for the first cell created after the 2 combine? In reality it is nothing but the 2 cells joined. 4 is still just 2 added to 2. It's not so much the cells as the circumstances around them that will allow them to actually become a child.
True enough, but there are laws of physics at work that we can dissect and quantify with a thrown object, not so with the morality of murder.
Exactly, which is why the process is somewhat bastardised. This hardware was never meant to help you evaluate the morality of murder. It was designed to help you make quick, fairly accurate, decisions without having to think about it, then act on those intuitions with conviction.
That helps you get food and fight competition. When you let that same wiring rule your moral system you get an inflated sense of your values validity because you haven't brought the conscious, more intelligent equations, into the mix.
Many of us arrive at this feeling, then use the conscious part to go looking for reasons and evidence to support our feeling. Ignoring or trivializing any information that contradicts it. This is not what this part of the brain was designed for. We should be making moral choices higher up in the brain than the part that tells me to swerve to miss the tree.
At its core, rational discourse assumes that both parties are entering honestly and willing to concede to evidence presented.
Which cannot happen if you want to blanket assume that our feelings on what conception is are untouchable. Scientists would like to know this too. Many of us can't see the argument that you are a whole human at conception. It just doesn't make sense to us. We define the things that make us human being our minds (IQ), not necessarily the way we look. Embryos are a cell. Embryos have no braincells, no nervous system, no sense of self. Why can't I use those cells to help a fully functional adult?
You can't debate it if you can't define what it is that makes something human. Concrete list of conditions and situations. The hard part for this gets to be that you have to keep evaluating this list of rules against other things. Sometimes one life is actually more important than another. If sacrificing one person could save a million, that might be worth it. Maybe we should worry more about the death and murder that happens to adults every day, as opposed to the cells we never allowed to become infants.
In a situation where this person will definitely die if we don't use a stem cell, why is an artificially fertilized and cultivated cell more valuable than the man sitting before me? By everyone's definition he is alive.
I apologise if it comes off this way. I'm just trying to discuss it. No harm intended.
some of my claims are faith-based and cannot be proved or disproved
Therein lies the problem. Everyone has a different code. Even if the majority was on your side, that doesn't make it right. If you can't quantify and explain it, it has no place being turned to law.
The real quntification occurs with determining liabilty, not morality.
My argument was that liability is the balancer. When you commit some act we use liability to make you "pay" for it. It's supposed to balance the equation back out.
I think you are using quantify to mean clarify.Their is no numerical analysis that tells me not to kill someone for a minor slight. Instead, there is an innate sense of scale, that can't be quantified, but can be qualified, that helps direct me toward an appropriate response.
No I mean quantify. When someone throws a ball at you, you don't consciously mathmatically work out the velocity of the ball, factor in gravity, and determine where the ball will be when it reaches you. You have special equation hardware that does it for you, and hands the information back as an instinct, otherwise you couldn't catch a ball. This is the same. The equations are back there, your brain is just doing what it does best, estimating. It quickly takes in all you know and does some quick equations on it, like catching the ball. It's fast and usually accurate enough to get the job done.
If you had to work this out consciously the prey would get away/ball would hit you/couldn't react to the potential car accident/etc.
Feelings are just that. In this case there are a chain of feelings.
For me lots of the work is trying to figure out exactly why I feel the way I feel on a topic. Then deciding if consciously I agree with the way this process happened. Sometimes I don't, and I change it.
The difference between us in this argument I really believe is the way we weighted the individual variables and decisions up to and including this point. Both are valid as our life experiences have moved them. If we begin to acknowledge that feelings aren't unchangeable sacred things, but just differences of opinion, it seems we could work things out rationally.
I don't think anything about us is unquantifiable.
Why save a life when I can kill a baby?
Yes I have. It was more like 4 weeks, not 8. That you and I know the menstruation cycle still doesn't make that what the passage said. You still made the 8 week thing up. It was not stated anywhere. Maybe they meant 4 months. I'm guessing a stem cell, which is way short of 8 weeks would not meet your cut-off. Forgetting that the passage had nothing to do with abortion at all anyway.
That was a well-hidden lure, Mr. Troll.
I find myself wishing you were better at hiding.