Yeah, that's actually not what you said though. You said you doubted that the hypothetical God was "interested" in providing proof.
Read it again. "I doubt such an all-powerful being would be interested in submitting to our scrutiny." to which you may add an assumed "if it existed".
Really? Because most of the (theistic) religions I know about make definite claims for god.
Yet the christian bible indicates that following god requires believing what you can't see and a deliberate choosing of scripture over reason. When you try and deconstruct the religion logically, you don't show nearly so much about the religion as you say about yourself. As a result, porn will be more likely to turn people from religion than your reasoning.
Your arguments are meaningless not because they're wrong but because they are unnecessary to the people who agree and unpersuasive to the people who don't. Try these out, from both old and new testaments:
Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
I Corinthians 1:21
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
Now how exactly do you plan to reason with people who accept that? I'm not a church goer either, by the way. I think it was more the behaviour of priests than reason that turned me off.
So... in other words you're inventing an excuse for the lack of proof.
No, I reason that lack of proof provided by a hypothetical god says exactly nothing about the existence or otherwise of that god. Given that, I fail to see how people could ever obtain such proof. The very characteristics of the god (in the religions that I know much about) preclude observation or measurement. For the purpose of scientific inquiry no further thought need to be given to the matter. The existence of god is not a scientific theory.
The idea that no proof is possible is trivially easy to disprove. If an all-powerful being exists, that being must have the power to prove it's own existence.
When people say no proof is possible they are referring to our ability to obtain proof, not an all-powerful being's capability to produce proof.
I doubt such an all-powerful being would be interested in submitting to our scrutiny. It would probably think of itself as the judge of our existence, not the other way around.
While your educational experience may have been one of loneliness, hostility and bullying, mine wasn't.
There were three groups of people in school, the bullies, the bullied and the passive enablers. There was some crossover between groups but everyone had a part to play and the experience is damaging to all. Perhaps the worst damaged are the passive enablers because they learned to ignore evil and go about their lives as if it wasn't happening. In every school there will be someone whose life is made a nightmare by a few while most look on and do nothing to help. You would be able to name the people I'm talking about from your school and so could your kids. It is systemic and just because it wasn't you personally means nothing in terms of a system that is imposed on the population at large.
If you think that bullying is a school-age experience only, you're wrong.
The things kids get away with in school would land you in prison quite quickly if you tried it on in the workplace. I have never seen in the workplace a group of workers assault a fellow worker, not once in over 20 years. Yet nearly everyone on/. would have known that to happen to some kid at school.
I think your child also learns better with someone who is not his parent. I see the kinds of things my son is capable of learning from third parties when I can't get him to tie his shoes without an argument and it only reinforces this.
If that is how it is for you I can see why home schooling is not for you. School is definitely designed to make kids easily manageable.
I wish I could afford a personal tutor but then again their are social aspects of school, even the negative ones, that teach lessons at least as valuable as some of the academic ones.
As for socialization, here's a summary of Australian research on home education. Socialisation
Studies which have looked at the social experiences of home educated students indicate that the students have broad, healthy social interactions although a few students would have appreciated more interaction with peers, particularly in home education network groups. Studies have also shown that some students who have been hurt socially at school have been able to recover when home educated.
Our department of education monitors our progress of "socializing" our kids while kids in their system commit suicide to avoid bullying. The widespread acceptance of the idea that people need to attend a government institution so they can learn to make friends is one of the most tragic examples of the damage school does to people. Such a thought should not occur to a healthy, whole human being.
A family obviously can have multiple children but in most cases they will be of different age. This will slow down the older children if taught simultaneously.
Our experience runs directly counter to this. The younger children see the older at their lessons because they are not separated off at a school. They then start learning the material so they can join in. All our younger children were doing their studies of their own initiative before school age.
It's having to live on one income that stops most families home educating, not the cost of educational materials. I've never heard anyone say they would home school but don't because they can't access educational material.
That and the fact that most people don't want to home school. I predict that the nook and kindle will have negligible impact on home schooling numbers. My kids are home schooled without a nook or kindle.
TFA is flamebait, an anti-school piece, not a technology piece. Not really news for nerds.
You can use a car in a film, you can show the badge and refer to it by the company name.
You can't use a cheap car, put an expensive car's badge on it at refer to it by the expensive car companies name.
It's pretty simple, doing the second has the potential to negatively impact the brand.
Financial literacy should not be required. Saying everyone should have to think about money is like saying everyone should have to think about sports, it's unnecessary and indicates a desire to control others' thoughts.
Sports are unnecessary, finance is not. I don't care what you think but I also don't want to pay for your upkeep because you couldn't be bothered doing it yourself.
Mankind survived without money for hundreds of thousands of years...
Yes, as hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers. Most people don't want that anymore, but it that's your thing then you're welcome to it.
There are many who would not excel at any of the skills you list. What is to be done with them?
You don't have to excel at finance to manage your own money. Even if you don't want to manage it yourself, you should know enough to know when you are being sold snake oil. I'm not a financial genius. I have a very simple, boring plan. It will not make me a billionaire but I have substantial benefit compared to not following a plan.
Look, there is an ongoing global finance crisis. Do you really think the prevailing experts are that much better than the average person? Most of those experts are mainly good at making money flow to them. They are not going to look after you any further than required in the process of looking after themselves, whether they work for the government or a corporation.
Most of your replies have had so little connection to what I've said that I haven't bothered to reply, especially since they are such nonsense anyway.
Telsa was financially incompetent, but produced. Give the Teslas a chance to do what they do best. Don't force them to waste their intellect studying finance just because your ideology tells you they should.
School systems cater mainly to the majority and provide a general education. Financial literacy should be considered part of a general education. We don't cut language, history, art, physical education, etc out of the curriculum because of "Teslas".
Most people aren't able to do competent financial planning.
Most? If so, that's probably largely because they've been conditioned not to do it. If they were taught to and had to most people would do ok. How are the experts doing? I mean for us, not for themselves. I'm about mid-way through my working life and there is no reasonable prospect that my compulsory superannuation alone will be enough to sustain me through retirement (unless I plan to die pretty quickly after stopping work). So I have made my own plans, only time will tell how good they are. In the meantime, the main effect my super has is to make me more expensive to employ.
The main problem with socialism as I see it is that it leads to a form of reverse Darwinism that over time destroys the ability of society to produce
You've hit the nail on the head there.
I suspect that the only way it can be made sustainable...
Without re-engineering the human race, it can not be made sustainable as a whole philosophy. At some point, you have to harness self-interest, and that's capitalism (which also can't sustainably be implemented as a whole philosophy, necessary as it is).
If most people are financially incompetent, rather than give in to that and have experts look after them, we should make financial literacy a core part of education curriculum.
If you were guaranteed a basic income, you wouldn't need to devote so much wisdom to money matters
Guaranteed income requires guaranteed production. You can't just get everyone to have enough by passing a law that it is so.
The issue is one of population control. In my country, a previous government wanted to increase the retirement age. Their plan to do so was simply change the law so that compulsory superannuation paid out at a later age. I'd bet that all the people who supported introduction of compulsory superannuation didn't realize it would one day be used to tell them when they were allowed to stop work.
If you organize your own retirement fund, you get to decide when to retire instead of having the government tell you. If that isn't the sort of thing that bothers you, I guess that we've got very different value systems. I don't mind having a safety net for people in times of need. A lifetime of financial dependence through induced incompetence is a nightmare, both for the individual and I'm convinced eventually for the society as well.
Isn't the "inflation tax" lower than any flat tax that's ever been proposed?
Well if we had just an "inflation tax" perhaps that would be relevant, but it just gets piled on top of all the other taxes. As I see it, it isn't the level of taxation from inflation that is the problem, it's that it taxes savings. It is one more thing creating an environment hostile to wise personal financial decision making.
Men are second-class-citizens when it comes to family law.
You think men have so high a status in family law that they hold any form of citizenship? I would have thought more along the lines of a scapegoat to absolve others of all wrongdoing or a resource to be exploited.
Sending it to her family clearly falls under harassment. Being allowed to write it, however, is a freedom of speech issue.
Well he did harass her and now he's lost some of his free speech rights. It's not a total disaster, he is still allowed to criticize the government, including this judge.
Most people agree that some actions can cause your 2nd amendment rights to be restricted, well apparently that applies to 1st amendment rights as well.
I do not think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection.
And yet you are criticizing "gun fetishists" for not engaging in armed insurrections.
I said that you gun fetishists always say you need them because you'll use them to protect our freedoms. But as I said, you never did, even when those freedoms were really grabbed a decade ago - by the politicians you voted
But in the same post you have said you don't think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection. The reason the people of the US haven't overthrown the government is because they agree with you on this one thing at least, that present levels of government abuse does not warrant revolution or civil war.
What I do is vote and speak reasonably with fellow voters about the government. You gun fetishists do not.
And you make false assumptions and accusations. I'm not a gun fetishist, you see. I haven't owned a gun since shortly after I stopped doing work that required it, about 20 years ago. As for speaking reasonably, berating a group of people for not doing something that you don't think they should do might not be considered reasonable by everyone. Just saying.
The US government that you elected because it panders to your gun fetish
Not only do I not have a gun fetish, I'm also not an American. You seem to know quite a bit about me that isn't true.
The idea that the Egyptian or Libyian revolutions this year say anything about you
It says that people who seem to tolerate oppression will overthrow it if they think it gets bad enough.
Do prices for entry-level smartphone service actually change in that period? Prepaid smartphones have only been around for about a year. And in order to save over the typical contract subsidy for smartphones, the other plan would need to be at least $20 per month cheaper.
I have used low end plans but wanted a phone that only came "free" on a higher plan. Phone companies offer phones on contract as an incentive to move you off plans they don't want to offer anymore. I don't specifically know about smartphone service, but I had a job for a few months selling mobile phones years ago. They are very keen to have you on contract I assure you and the only reason I can think of is that they make more money that way. And yes, prices will change and also service and conditions.
I don't know about the Australian market, but in the United States market, unless you're switching back to a carrier that you had used before, switching carriers means getting a new phone.
No, here you just switch sim cards. Only pre-paid phones are locked.
A typical unlocked GSM phone works on exactly one carrier: AT&T. CDMA2000 phones do not work on GSM networks nor vice versa, and even within a particular system, different carriers use different bands of spectrum; most GSM phones don't support the band where T-Mobile has its 3G.
On the three biggest U.S. carriers, month-to-month service costs the same as 2-year contract service, and one would be dumb not to take the free phone.
Not always. If the phone you want only comes "free" on a higher plan than your phone use warrants you can be better off buying your phone outright and staying on the lower plan. If prices change within that two years the ability to switch plans or carriers can save you money. If your phone breaks while you are on month-to-month you can immediately get a new phone by going on contract.
The only reason companies offer a "free" phone with a contract is because they make more money by locking you in for two years than it costs them to provide the phone. If you want the phone that's great, but it isn't always the best way to go just because the call plan has the same monthly charge.
Yet you can maintain that house well so it keeps value relative to other houses, or make improvements. Luck plays a part in anything you do, yet my experience is that following a plan puts you in a better position to take advantage of good luck and often insulates you somewhat from bad luck. I suspect I'd not be nearly as vulnerable to a crashing market as people that take no interest in their own future provision.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's actually not what you said though. You said you doubted that the hypothetical God was "interested" in providing proof.
Read it again. "I doubt such an all-powerful being would be interested in submitting to our scrutiny." to which you may add an assumed "if it existed".
Really? Because most of the (theistic) religions I know about make definite claims for god.
Yet the christian bible indicates that following god requires believing what you can't see and a deliberate choosing of scripture over reason. When you try and deconstruct the religion logically, you don't show nearly so much about the religion as you say about yourself. As a result, porn will be more likely to turn people from religion than your reasoning.
Your arguments are meaningless not because they're wrong but because they are unnecessary to the people who agree and unpersuasive to the people who don't. Try these out, from both old and new testaments:
Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
I Corinthians 1:21 For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
Now how exactly do you plan to reason with people who accept that? I'm not a church goer either, by the way. I think it was more the behaviour of priests than reason that turned me off.
So... in other words you're inventing an excuse for the lack of proof.
No, I reason that lack of proof provided by a hypothetical god says exactly nothing about the existence or otherwise of that god. Given that, I fail to see how people could ever obtain such proof. The very characteristics of the god (in the religions that I know much about) preclude observation or measurement. For the purpose of scientific inquiry no further thought need to be given to the matter. The existence of god is not a scientific theory.
The idea that no proof is possible is trivially easy to disprove. If an all-powerful being exists, that being must have the power to prove it's own existence.
When people say no proof is possible they are referring to our ability to obtain proof, not an all-powerful being's capability to produce proof.
I doubt such an all-powerful being would be interested in submitting to our scrutiny. It would probably think of itself as the judge of our existence, not the other way around.
While your educational experience may have been one of loneliness, hostility and bullying, mine wasn't.
There were three groups of people in school, the bullies, the bullied and the passive enablers. There was some crossover between groups but everyone had a part to play and the experience is damaging to all. Perhaps the worst damaged are the passive enablers because they learned to ignore evil and go about their lives as if it wasn't happening. In every school there will be someone whose life is made a nightmare by a few while most look on and do nothing to help. You would be able to name the people I'm talking about from your school and so could your kids. It is systemic and just because it wasn't you personally means nothing in terms of a system that is imposed on the population at large.
If you think that bullying is a school-age experience only, you're wrong.
The things kids get away with in school would land you in prison quite quickly if you tried it on in the workplace. I have never seen in the workplace a group of workers assault a fellow worker, not once in over 20 years. Yet nearly everyone on /. would have known that to happen to some kid at school.
I think your child also learns better with someone who is not his parent. I see the kinds of things my son is capable of learning from third parties when I can't get him to tie his shoes without an argument and it only reinforces this.
If that is how it is for you I can see why home schooling is not for you. School is definitely designed to make kids easily manageable.
I wish I could afford a personal tutor but then again their are social aspects of school, even the negative ones, that teach lessons at least as valuable as some of the academic ones.
As for socialization, here's a summary of Australian research on home education.
Socialisation
Studies which have looked at the social experiences of home educated students indicate that the students have broad, healthy social interactions although a few students would have appreciated more interaction with peers, particularly in home education network groups. Studies have also shown that some students who have been hurt socially at school have been able to recover when home educated.
Our department of education monitors our progress of "socializing" our kids while kids in their system commit suicide to avoid bullying. The widespread acceptance of the idea that people need to attend a government institution so they can learn to make friends is one of the most tragic examples of the damage school does to people. Such a thought should not occur to a healthy, whole human being.
A family obviously can have multiple children but in most cases they will be of different age. This will slow down the older children if taught simultaneously.
Our experience runs directly counter to this. The younger children see the older at their lessons because they are not separated off at a school. They then start learning the material so they can join in. All our younger children were doing their studies of their own initiative before school age.
It's having to live on one income that stops most families home educating, not the cost of educational materials. I've never heard anyone say they would home school but don't because they can't access educational material.
That and the fact that most people don't want to home school. I predict that the nook and kindle will have negligible impact on home schooling numbers. My kids are home schooled without a nook or kindle.
TFA is flamebait, an anti-school piece, not a technology piece. Not really news for nerds.
You can use a car in a film, you can show the badge and refer to it by the company name.
You can't use a cheap car, put an expensive car's badge on it at refer to it by the expensive car companies name.
It's pretty simple, doing the second has the potential to negatively impact the brand.
Financial literacy should not be required. Saying everyone should have to think about money is like saying everyone should have to think about sports, it's unnecessary and indicates a desire to control others' thoughts.
Sports are unnecessary, finance is not. I don't care what you think but I also don't want to pay for your upkeep because you couldn't be bothered doing it yourself.
Mankind survived without money for hundreds of thousands of years...
Yes, as hunter/gatherers or subsistence farmers. Most people don't want that anymore, but it that's your thing then you're welcome to it.
There are many who would not excel at any of the skills you list. What is to be done with them?
You don't have to excel at finance to manage your own money. Even if you don't want to manage it yourself, you should know enough to know when you are being sold snake oil. I'm not a financial genius. I have a very simple, boring plan. It will not make me a billionaire but I have substantial benefit compared to not following a plan.
Look, there is an ongoing global finance crisis. Do you really think the prevailing experts are that much better than the average person? Most of those experts are mainly good at making money flow to them. They are not going to look after you any further than required in the process of looking after themselves, whether they work for the government or a corporation.
Telsa was financially incompetent, but produced. Give the Teslas a chance to do what they do best. Don't force them to waste their intellect studying finance just because your ideology tells you they should.
School systems cater mainly to the majority and provide a general education. Financial literacy should be considered part of a general education. We don't cut language, history, art, physical education, etc out of the curriculum because of "Teslas".
Most people aren't able to do competent financial planning.
Most? If so, that's probably largely because they've been conditioned not to do it. If they were taught to and had to most people would do ok. How are the experts doing? I mean for us, not for themselves. I'm about mid-way through my working life and there is no reasonable prospect that my compulsory superannuation alone will be enough to sustain me through retirement (unless I plan to die pretty quickly after stopping work). So I have made my own plans, only time will tell how good they are. In the meantime, the main effect my super has is to make me more expensive to employ.
The main problem with socialism as I see it is that it leads to a form of reverse Darwinism that over time destroys the ability of society to produce
You've hit the nail on the head there.
I suspect that the only way it can be made sustainable...
Without re-engineering the human race, it can not be made sustainable as a whole philosophy. At some point, you have to harness self-interest, and that's capitalism (which also can't sustainably be implemented as a whole philosophy, necessary as it is).
If most people are financially incompetent, rather than give in to that and have experts look after them, we should make financial literacy a core part of education curriculum.
If you were guaranteed a basic income, you wouldn't need to devote so much wisdom to money matters
Guaranteed income requires guaranteed production. You can't just get everyone to have enough by passing a law that it is so.
The issue is one of population control. In my country, a previous government wanted to increase the retirement age. Their plan to do so was simply change the law so that compulsory superannuation paid out at a later age. I'd bet that all the people who supported introduction of compulsory superannuation didn't realize it would one day be used to tell them when they were allowed to stop work.
If you organize your own retirement fund, you get to decide when to retire instead of having the government tell you. If that isn't the sort of thing that bothers you, I guess that we've got very different value systems. I don't mind having a safety net for people in times of need. A lifetime of financial dependence through induced incompetence is a nightmare, both for the individual and I'm convinced eventually for the society as well.
Isn't the "inflation tax" lower than any flat tax that's ever been proposed?
Well if we had just an "inflation tax" perhaps that would be relevant, but it just gets piled on top of all the other taxes. As I see it, it isn't the level of taxation from inflation that is the problem, it's that it taxes savings. It is one more thing creating an environment hostile to wise personal financial decision making.
We can overcome any genes for rape, murder an oppression with some ideas of doing the right thing.
Those ideas are backed up by the police force, courts and prison system. Ideas alone are not enough.
It's our collective consciousness that is getting more saturated with truth.
Wow. That's, like, cosmic man.
Something tells me either the US or Burma knew Kim Jong Il was on his deathbed and they wanted to establish a plan 'B' ahead of time.
He was 70 years old and in ill health. It wasn't exactly a secret.
In Korea, only old people are overlords.
Men are second-class-citizens when it comes to family law.
You think men have so high a status in family law that they hold any form of citizenship? I would have thought more along the lines of a scapegoat to absolve others of all wrongdoing or a resource to be exploited.
Sending it to her family clearly falls under harassment. Being allowed to write it, however, is a freedom of speech issue.
Well he did harass her and now he's lost some of his free speech rights. It's not a total disaster, he is still allowed to criticize the government, including this judge.
Most people agree that some actions can cause your 2nd amendment rights to be restricted, well apparently that applies to 1st amendment rights as well.
I hear there's precedent that unless you're a public figure your right to privacy can trump someone's right to free speech.
I think the case could be made that King George was a public figure.
Thanks, but I doubt you have to leave your country for sane discussion.
I do not think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection.
And yet you are criticizing "gun fetishists" for not engaging in armed insurrections.
I said that you gun fetishists always say you need them because you'll use them to protect our freedoms. But as I said, you never did, even when those freedoms were really grabbed a decade ago - by the politicians you voted
But in the same post you have said you don't think that present government abuse is worthy of armed insurrection. The reason the people of the US haven't overthrown the government is because they agree with you on this one thing at least, that present levels of government abuse does not warrant revolution or civil war.
What I do is vote and speak reasonably with fellow voters about the government. You gun fetishists do not.
And you make false assumptions and accusations. I'm not a gun fetishist, you see. I haven't owned a gun since shortly after I stopped doing work that required it, about 20 years ago. As for speaking reasonably, berating a group of people for not doing something that you don't think they should do might not be considered reasonable by everyone. Just saying.
The US government that you elected because it panders to your gun fetish
Not only do I not have a gun fetish, I'm also not an American. You seem to know quite a bit about me that isn't true.
The idea that the Egyptian or Libyian revolutions this year say anything about you
It says that people who seem to tolerate oppression will overthrow it if they think it gets bad enough.
Do prices for entry-level smartphone service actually change in that period? Prepaid smartphones have only been around for about a year. And in order to save over the typical contract subsidy for smartphones, the other plan would need to be at least $20 per month cheaper.
I have used low end plans but wanted a phone that only came "free" on a higher plan. Phone companies offer phones on contract as an incentive to move you off plans they don't want to offer anymore. I don't specifically know about smartphone service, but I had a job for a few months selling mobile phones years ago. They are very keen to have you on contract I assure you and the only reason I can think of is that they make more money that way. And yes, prices will change and also service and conditions.
I don't know about the Australian market, but in the United States market, unless you're switching back to a carrier that you had used before, switching carriers means getting a new phone.
No, here you just switch sim cards. Only pre-paid phones are locked.
A typical unlocked GSM phone works on exactly one carrier: AT&T. CDMA2000 phones do not work on GSM networks nor vice versa, and even within a particular system, different carriers use different bands of spectrum; most GSM phones don't support the band where T-Mobile has its 3G.
That's a shitty system.
On the three biggest U.S. carriers, month-to-month service costs the same as 2-year contract service, and one would be dumb not to take the free phone.
Not always. If the phone you want only comes "free" on a higher plan than your phone use warrants you can be better off buying your phone outright and staying on the lower plan. If prices change within that two years the ability to switch plans or carriers can save you money. If your phone breaks while you are on month-to-month you can immediately get a new phone by going on contract.
The only reason companies offer a "free" phone with a contract is because they make more money by locking you in for two years than it costs them to provide the phone. If you want the phone that's great, but it isn't always the best way to go just because the call plan has the same monthly charge.
Yet you can maintain that house well so it keeps value relative to other houses, or make improvements. Luck plays a part in anything you do, yet my experience is that following a plan puts you in a better position to take advantage of good luck and often insulates you somewhat from bad luck. I suspect I'd not be nearly as vulnerable to a crashing market as people that take no interest in their own future provision.