I think that in general companies compete "harder" for pieces of the USA market for most goods. The idea is that the USA is the world's largest consumer for many products, especially high-priced items, and so companies are willing to accept lower margins there just to stay in the game.
I have been living in NZ for a couple of years and it's a feeling I've gotten repeatedly as I've looked at the price of goods in NZ vs. USA. Some things, like round-trip airline tickets from NZ to USA or vice-versa, are priced much higher when you buy then in NZ than when you buy them in the USA (from the same airline company). I can only conclude that the airline wants to stay in the US market and in order to do so, it has to compete harder on price when selling there. Before for the poor souls in NZ whose airline market isn't as competitive or globally important, the costs for the same tickets are much higher.
To some degree, it seems that other countries subsidize the price of goods in the US by paying higher local prices for the same items as are sold in the USA, therefore allowing the company selling those goods to retain a profit margin while selling at a much lower cost in the USA than they would otherwise.
That's a really dumb overdramatization. If this were a significant, pervasive problem, you can bet there would be lots and lots of public outcry. I and literally MILLIONS of people have flown tens of millions of flights without issues like this. I think the whole way that TSA handles flight security is pretty brain dead, and I curse them under my breath every time I have to take my shoes off to go through the security check, but it doesn't even show up on the radar of important things in my life.
I think the true pariahs are those who cloud the discussion with overreactions like yours. I'd love to continue discussing this issue with you, but - Oh dear - is that the time already...
Are you serious? I remember clearly the entire 4 years of Quayle's vice presidency. He was dumb as dirt. My particular favorite was the one where he went on and on and blathered completely unintelligable bullshit about Hawaii.
Here I found a nice little montage on YouTube for you to enjoy:
Now THAT is one stupid motherfucker. ALthough, for many of those gaffes, he appears to be high or drunk or something. Maybe he was a genius with a drug habit?
But he has a LONG way to go from a couple of gaffes to the years of systematic idiocy that was Dan Quayle. I am pretty sure that there are entire yearly joke calendars filled with dumb things that Quayle said while he was V.P. (I'm pretty sure such things exist for GWB as well). I doubt you could fill a week with the dumb Biden comments thus far. I watched a brief bit of the VP "debate" and Biden looked smarter to me than Palin did. So aside from some gaffes I don't see him being systematically brain-dead stupid like Quayle was or Dubya is.
Awesome dude. I love how you threw out that "let's be reasonable and consider all the facts" bullshit just to dupe people into reading how much you'd like to nuke the middle east. Hook, line, sinker - nice job!
Huh? Is that some kind of joke whose punchline went over my head?
If you'd said that Sarah Palin, with her rambling incoherence, is the Dan Quayle 2.0, I'd understand you. But Joe Biden? What exactly does he have in common with Quayle?
We're talking about the same Dan Quayle right? The one who is the sole reason that George W. Bush isn't the dumbest politician America has ever seen?
1. You did not provide any facts (at least not in the post I responded to; maybe you have in other posts in this topic, but I haven't been keeping very good track of who-said-what)
2. You don't seem to understand the definition of "moral equivalism". The things you are talking about are all completely different in nature: the scope of the issue, who was involved, what the circumstances were, during what time period they occurred, how controversial the details are, etc. They are all completely different. Trying to treat them all the same is moral equivalism, and it's just pointless.
It's ridiculous to me how many people always want to respond in discussions about muslim violence with statements about how "the US government does the same thing". First of all, it's not relevent to the discussion, it's off-topic and just adds noise to an already noisy debate, and second of all, it's pointless to even try to make such comparisons because to do so is pointless moral equivalism.
I'm not going to argue with you whether or not it's more or less "OK" for the US government to kill people than muslims, because it's just such a stupid and pointless debate, and moreover, because it's off-topic. Your *wanting* it to be on topic because you want to complain about the US government does not make it on topic.
Can you ever remember saying to yourself in your dream, "that man has such a funny red hat", or any other similar statement that involved color? That would give an indication that you were perceiving colors during your dream, even though you can't reconstruct the image that you were perceiving from memory with sufficient clarity to perceive the color again.
I myself definitely have seen color in my dreams, almost all of them, and definitely remember specific colors all the time. That being said, my memories are always fuzzy to varying degrees, and a single dream will have a range of clarity in what I recall.
- Some of it I remember just as very high-level ideas, not specifics, example: "I was dreaming that there was a tornado coming", but without any specific images or other details.
- Some of it I remember as broken up sequences of events that I reconstruct into what "must have been" a coherent whole; example: "I heard a loud whooshing noise, looked in my back yard, and saw a tornado in the distance", "Some time after that, I was in my house and I knew that the tornado was just outside and I had to get downstairs", "Later, there were a bunch of people I didn't know in my house and we were looking at the broken furniture and stuff strewn everywhere and the roof was missing, I got the feeling that they had all come to my house for shelter from the tornado" - while all of these are mere snapshots of what would have been presumably a complete experience with all of the gaps filled in, I don't remember what happened between the short segments of dream that I recall. But I do have an overwhelming feeling that there was a continuity, I just can't recall it.
- Some of it I remember as very detailed snapshots, just a mere moment in which all of my senses were engaged in a coherent and whole perception: "the window was open, I could feel the wind blowing in on my face, I felt an intense dread and fear as I watched the tornado spinning towards my house, the tornado was white and grey, a tall funnel cloud that moved slowly towards me, it was clearly late afternoon and the sky was dark and everything had a very eerie and surreal quality. The grass was green and I could see trees behind the tornado. The window sill was white and there was slightly golden glow from the sun behind the thick black clouds". From these snapshots I know that my dream included specific sensory experiences like color, texture, the feel of my body, smells, etc.
My memories of any particular dream will always have a mixture of these components, to varying degrees. All of these different levels of dream recall convince me that dreams, while I am experiencing them:
- Have moments of great coherency, but also large stretches of nonlinearness and just strange leaps of logic and perception - Include detailed perceptions from all five senses, although definitely not always coherent, and not all senses are stimulated all the time - Often are very lengthy, but often the dream changes its nature almost completely between parts - Often have strong emotional compoenents - Sometimes have uncanny consistency that one would think could only be driven by a plot that was already laid out before I even dreamed it. For example, sometimes I dream something early in a dream that doesn't make any sense at all until later in the dream, when I realize the reason for what I dreamt earlier. Sometimes these are so sophisticated and intertwined that it is impossible to think that me dream didn't have some idea "where it was going" before I even dreamed it - Usually I participate actively in the experience, making decisions and acting on them, in ways that are both affected by, and affect, the outcome of the dream as it unfolds
I think that everyone experiences dreams in these same ways, to a large degree, the main difference being:
- How much you "care" about dreams, which affects how much effort your subconscious mind puts into participating your dreams. I honestly believe that you only have really vivid and co
I sincerely doubt that your mind created the perception of coherent colors while you were watching a black and white TV.
I think it's much more likely that two factors are at work:
1. Cloudy memory due to the gap of time between now and when you were a child combined with the fact that children don't have very good memories anyway
2. When you were a child, you may not have noticed the difference between black and white and color programs because you were not paying any attention to that aspect of your experience
Even today, my wife, who is in her 30's, says she can't tell the difference between standard definition and high definition programming. I know that she really can, but when she watches TV, it's just not something that she pays any attention to. So left to her own devices, her memory of watching a program doesn't retain any perception of the video quality of the program. If I were to sit down with her and show her a standard def program and a high def side by side (or even one after the other on the same set), we'd be able to talk through the differences, which I am certain she could notice and appreciate if instructed to do so. So when her attention is specifically directed by an outside influence to video quality, she can perceive the difference. But her mind does not normally notice such things so on her own, her experience of watching a program has no component which is related to video quality, and furthermore, what she remembers about it loses any small amount of perception of video quality that she might have had at the time she was watching it.
I use her as an example, but I think that every single person does the same sort of thing with numerous aspects of perception all the time.
I think that when you were a kid, if someone had shown you black and white TV and color TV side by side, you clearly would have seen the difference. But when you were left to your own devices, watching that black and white TV, you didn't pay any attention to the hues you were perceiving on the screen. So if afterwards someone asked you (or you asked yourself) whether or not you had watched a color or black and white TV program, you would have replied based on what you had assumed about your experience, rather than what you had actually perceived.
Color vs. black-and-white is definitely a pretty big thing to just sweep under the rug of perception, but I think it really is the same as much more subtle aspects to what we perceive, like video quality, just to a different degree. And I think that being a kid, with the inherent lack of maturity of thought and perception of childhood, you were more able to filter that part of your experience out than you would be today as an adult, which is why it seems so strange and impossible now to think that you could have done that back then.
That was a truly awesome post. I have a sincere admiration for your ability to clearly, comprehensively, accurately, and with great patience and clear wording, lay out the facts. I wish I could do the same - but I get so frustrated with people like the O.P. to whom you were responding; no matter how much rational and coherent argument you present, as you have, they always seem to come back with the same tired and inaccurate hyperbole. Kudos to you for rising above, and keep it up, for those of us who lack the patience to do so ourselves!
I do believe what I am saying. And yes, you are right, you might as well not vote; it really won't matter. That is to say, it will not matter with regards to the outcome of the election. But it does matter for other reasons. It is one of those things that is morally obligated in a democratic society; we are all responsible for casting our votes because this is how the democracy operates. Similarly to how we're all morally obligated to pick up a piece of trash that we see on the street, to make the world a better place, even though that one piece of trash is not going to have a significant impact on the planet as a whole (although picking up a piece of trash is even more important than voting, because that piece of trash can have significant effects on the local environment, whereas voting for president of the USA has only one insignificant nation-wide effect).
To put it bluntly: your vote will not affect the outcome of the election. Even if votes were counted perfectly, it is statistically impossible. Then consider that if the vote counting ever did come down to N votes for candidate A versus N+1 votes for candidate B, you can be pretty sure that there will be lots and lots of fudging going on to try to win the election for one candidate instead of the other (as we can see in your 2000 election example, where even the closest election in USA history still came down to hundreds/thousands of votes, so still your single vote wouldn't have decided the outcome, and yet in the end who voted for whom didn't matter as much as how the political process unfolded with regards to deciding the winner), making your one vote even less significant.
So given that, a personal motivation to cast one's vote not for whom one wants to win, but the best choice of whom one thinks is most likely to win, has no logical basis. Consider:
I really want candidate C from a third party to win. The chances that whether or not they will win depends on whether or not I vote for them is infinitesimally small, for all intents and purposes 0. And yet, even if I decide to vote for candidate B from a major party, who is my favorite choice from the candidates most likely to win, the chance that my vote will alter the outcome of the election is ALSO infinitesimally small, for all intents and purposes 0.
So the burden of proof is on you to show why it makes any sense to vote for your second choice candidate instead of your first choice candidate, when the expected outcome from one's actions cannot be used as a justification for voting one way instead of the other.
I think that in any democracy, people should always vote for whom they WANT to win, instead of whom they perceive as the best choice of those candidates whom they perceive as MOST LIKELY to win. Thus the most popular candidate will always be elected, and third parties will flourish, something that would have the greatest positive impact on USA politics imaginable. I think that the same moral obligation that compels us to vote even when our single vote is insignificant, compels us to vote for the candidate that we most want to win, regardless of what party they are from or what we perceive as their chances of winning the election.
Once again: is your vote going to change the outcome of the election? If so, vote for the third-party candidate you want to win, and you will be happy that your vote chose the candidate you liked. If not, then why bother voting for the candidate that you don't like, if it's not going to matter either way?
As I said before, the only way your logic makes any sense is if your vote somehow affects the outcome of the election only if you cast it for your preferred candidate from the two major parties. That is statistically impossible. The election will not come down to a single vote, your vote, deciding the outcome.
This is where people start to invoke the "but if everyone did what you say" arguments, which like I pointed out earlier, are meaningless. You can't control what everyone else is going to do. So why should it affect how you decide to vote?
"I'm not clear on if you agree that plurality voting is problematic or not. In this election you either vote for Obama or McCain or if you prefer a third party candidate you vote for that candidate AND EFFECTIVELY GIVE A VOTE AGAINST YOUR preference of McCain or Obama. Again, this has been explained elsewhere much better than I can do here."
I agree that plurality voting is problematic. I sincerely believe that changing the voting mechanisms of the USA would have a far greater positive long-term effect on the politics of the USA than anything else we could do. I think a system where everyone could rank the candidates in order of preference and submit that ranking as a vote, and a metric for choosing the winner as the one who satisfies the most people (i.e. the candidate who gets 90% of the 'second place' votes would win over a candidate who got 40% of the 'first place' votes), would increase the viability of third parties in the USA to the extent that there would no longer be a simple two-party system. And this would eliminate the vast majority of the problems that exist in politics in the USA. The net result would be of greater benefit to the USA than just about anything else that we could do.
As to your point about a vote for a third party being a vote against your preferred candidate from the two major parties... I don't quite understand it. It's also true that a vote for one of the two major parties is a vote against your preferred third party candidate. How should these facts affect your decision about who to vote for? Since the logic works both ways, I don't think they should affect your decisions at all.
First off, you're an asshole for even trying to play that 'holier than thou' card.
Second, unless you are planning on selling your investments in the short term, you can't say that the current drop in value will have any material effect on your investment. My investments are also down considerably, but I don't expect to sell them off for 30+ years so I don't get too excited about what is happening in the short term. Anyone who actually understands investing realizes that it's much better for them that the financial industries of the country be strong and efficient; this is what drives investment values higher over time. A weak financial system will produce weak results. And yet this bailout is nothing other than a HUGE gift to the least efficient and least deserving parts of the financial industry. And it is people like yourself who cry about the short term value of their investments that are making this whole mess happen.
It's not clear from what you've written whether or not you believe that they will ultimately be able to do this. But if you do, then you ought to re-think your position. Do you honestly believe that the government is somehow going to do better with this 700 billion dollar investment than the market would have? The government has bought bad debt and will not recover a fraction of its value. The 700+ billion dollars was just gifted to corporations that made bad loans. The taxpayer will never see this money again.
Do you believe that your vote will have a significant chance of affecting the election outcome? If so, why wouldn't you vote for the person you WANT to have in office?
Or do you believe that your vote will not have a significant chance of affecting the election outcome? If so, why do you think it's more important to cast an insignificant vote for the more likely to win candidate than the candidate you prefer? After all, your vote won't really matter either way, right?
You can't have it both ways. You can't say that your vote matters but that it only matters if you cast it for a certain party. That's just ridiculous.
Also, although you didn't say this, the other logical fallacy with regards to voting is when people invoke the "but if everyone did that" argument. You can't control what everyone does, so whether or not everyone else will or won't do it shouldn't affect your own judgement about how to vote. The idea that you should do something because 'if everyone did it' the outcome would be different, is just ridiculous. If you control everyone else, then by all means, make them vote how you want them to. But you don't control everyone else, so you should vote according to who YOU want to win, not who everyone ELSE wants to win. If someone says to me, 'you're voting third party? But if everyone who voted third party voted for candidate N, then we'd have a real chance of winning! Why are you wasting your vote on a third party instead of helping us get candidate N into office?", the only sensible reply is, "You're voting for candidate N? But if everyone who voted for candidate N voted third party instead, then we'd have a real chance of winning!" You see what I did there? The argument works just as well both ways.
All that being said, I'm voting for Obama this year after having voted Libertarian in every election that I was able to vote in previously (starting in 1992). I just like him as a candidate, and libertarianism has lost some of its sheen as I've thought more about it over the years. But I'm not voting for Obama because I feel like it's a more or less effective use of my vote. It's who I honestly want to win, and I think that every person should vote with the same motivation.
I do agree with you that a fundamental change to the voting system would be the single most effective way to improve the state of American politics though. Being able to rank candidates and vote for many at once would quickly destroy the two-party system that is strangling US politics.
I don't know very much about the actual causes of this issue, however I do find it really annoying that someone must invariably turn the discussion into an "it's the Democrats' fault! No, it's the Republicans' fault!" waste of time. You cited only Democratic presidents (and president hopefuls) in your post. I find it VERY hard to believe that there isn't blame to be place on just about every politician out there, regardless of party. So why do you feel the need to try to make this issue partisan? It's attitudes like yours that turn intelligent discussion into useless time sinks, which is the root cause of the USA's political environment being so dysfunctional.
In short: if voters use their brains, then they will elect politicians who use their brains. You are encouraging voters not to use their brains with arguments like yours. So you and people like you are the real root of the problem.
If you checked and discovered that your comments were irrelevent before you posted, why on god's green earth did you then go and click 'submit'. The correct choice would have been your browser's "back" button...
I've had my own vanity domain for about 10 years now... it's may last name. So my email address is my-first-name@my-last-name.com. I thought back then that it would be cool and all and that it would carry some 'cachet' as you said. In fact, it hasn't really mattered at all. 100% of people that I give my email address to could not care less what the actual text of the email address is. Also, none of those people that I thought would come out of the woodwork now that they have a way to easily find me, have done so. Maybe if I was more popular in high school or something...
So to summarize: don't bother. Nobody actually cares what your email address is, despite what you may think. Even business associates won't care.
"Do you feel that a Principal should be able to suspend/expel the kid from school for throwing rocks at his house?"
If the kid posted a video on YouTube of him/herself doing it, then yes, because at that point the kid is involving the entire student body (or attempting to anyway) in his or her prank.
Definitely what is or isn't a school-related incident is up for interpretation, and you can choose any arbitrarily grey example you want to, but I don't think that makes the issue black and white.
Both your and my arguments seem to come down to whether or not you think that the incident is sufficiently clearly school related to be within the jurisdiction of the principle. I think it is, because I think of school as being a larger entity than just the physical boundaries of the school yard. When kids are in school, school is a significant fraction of their lives, and likewise, a significant fraction of a kids' life is school-related, even when they are not actually on school grounds. That's the way I see it. Your viewpoint is that school-related issues are only those issues which occur on school property during school hours. I am not sure that there is any specific logical argument that one could make in favor of one or the other position, they are just different viewpoints, each with some valid arguments behind them. At this point I would say it comes down to what judges, and by extension (hopefully) most people, think about this issue.
Your examples of injudicious use of disciplinary force by school officials are not, in my opinion, arguments against a rigid policy of respect towards the school. They are arguments for some oversight of teacher behavior, but just because some teachers abuse their power does not mean that teachers should not be given significant leeway in assigning punishment for bad student behavior. Sure, some teachers are going to do the wrong thing, but dealing with such issues on a case-by-case basis is, to me, much preferrable to weakening the entire school system to the extent that the system can no longer function, which is what I think has been happening for the past generation or two.
If one of the things that you mentioned as abusive behavior were done to my kid, I would:
1) Tell my kid that the teacher was out of line, but that they (my kid) was ultimately responsible for the situation by doing whatever wrong thing they weren't supposed to have done. Even if a teacher is out of line, if they are not grossly wrong, I will back the teacher. So my kid has their feelings hurt? They'll get over it, but the lesson of respect in the educational environment, and that they should focus on their studies and stay out of such trouble, is a much more important lesson to get out of such a situation.
2) Talk to the teacher personally about the problem with the aim of letting the teacher know that they stepped over the line so that next time, they won't. If this particular teacher becomes a repeat offender in clear cases of overstepping their disciplinary bounds, then I will take it up with the principle, school board, whoever necessary to see corrective action taken.
I guess my attitude comes from my inherent belief that the vast majority of teachers are struggling with kids with discipline problems at school and in such a situation, there will always be some collateral damage. Teachers cannot do their jobs perfectly at any time, and it is much harder when there are disruptive influences in the classroom. If my kid is in any way a contributor to that... well, I'd come down much harder on my kid, who is causing problems, then any teacher, any day.
I was a teenager once, I know what kids do. They try to get away with whatever they can. If some get slapped down hard because of it sometimes, then so be it. This is not carte blanche for teachers to do whatever they want, but... I'm pretty sure that the vast, vast, VAST majority of teachers are not going to school every day looking to cause problems. But there are a significant number of kids who are. So I side with the teachers.
I'm not sure that they, or anyone for that matter, feel that they can compete with stolen goods. People who steal movies online are unlikely to pay for any format, because they can always just download for free.
I'm not innocent of this kind of theft myself; I recently watched an NFL football game rebroadcast via something called 'sopcast', clearly violating the copyright of the NFL and CBS. I feel kind of bad about it, and there is no real justification despite the fact that you simply cannot get these games in my local (New Zealand) market.
"Unfortunately, very few parents actually do this it seems today. Someone's got to take up the slack unless we want a generation of moral and ethical cripples."
And what's worse, people like the O.P. believe that only THEY have any moral right to discipline their own children. I am not sure exactly where they get this idea, or how they manage to speak about it as if it's such an obvious truth.
By the way, we already have a generation of moral and ethical cripples, we've had generations of them in fact, and it's because of attitudes like those of the O.P.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that in general companies compete "harder" for pieces of the USA market for most goods. The idea is that the USA is the world's largest consumer for many products, especially high-priced items, and so companies are willing to accept lower margins there just to stay in the game.
I have been living in NZ for a couple of years and it's a feeling I've gotten repeatedly as I've looked at the price of goods in NZ vs. USA. Some things, like round-trip airline tickets from NZ to USA or vice-versa, are priced much higher when you buy then in NZ than when you buy them in the USA (from the same airline company). I can only conclude that the airline wants to stay in the US market and in order to do so, it has to compete harder on price when selling there. Before for the poor souls in NZ whose airline market isn't as competitive or globally important, the costs for the same tickets are much higher.
To some degree, it seems that other countries subsidize the price of goods in the US by paying higher local prices for the same items as are sold in the USA, therefore allowing the company selling those goods to retain a profit margin while selling at a much lower cost in the USA than they would otherwise.
That's a really dumb overdramatization. If this were a significant, pervasive problem, you can bet there would be lots and lots of public outcry. I and literally MILLIONS of people have flown tens of millions of flights without issues like this. I think the whole way that TSA handles flight security is pretty brain dead, and I curse them under my breath every time I have to take my shoes off to go through the security check, but it doesn't even show up on the radar of important things in my life.
I think the true pariahs are those who cloud the discussion with overreactions like yours. I'd love to continue discussing this issue with you, but - Oh dear - is that the time already ...
I've provided documented evidence of how dumb Quayle was. You have provided nothing. Anyway, I'm done exchanging barbs with an anonymous pussy.
Are you serious? I remember clearly the entire 4 years of Quayle's vice presidency. He was dumb as dirt. My particular favorite was the one where he went on and on and blathered completely unintelligable bullshit about Hawaii.
Here I found a nice little montage on YouTube for you to enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIFggCQv4J4
Now THAT is one stupid motherfucker. ALthough, for many of those gaffes, he appears to be high or drunk or something. Maybe he was a genius with a drug habit?
Yes, that sounds pretty stupid.
But he has a LONG way to go from a couple of gaffes to the years of systematic idiocy that was Dan Quayle. I am pretty sure that there are entire yearly joke calendars filled with dumb things that Quayle said while he was V.P. (I'm pretty sure such things exist for GWB as well). I doubt you could fill a week with the dumb Biden comments thus far. I watched a brief bit of the VP "debate" and Biden looked smarter to me than Palin did. So aside from some gaffes I don't see him being systematically brain-dead stupid like Quayle was or Dubya is.
Awesome dude. I love how you threw out that "let's be reasonable and consider all the facts" bullshit just to dupe people into reading how much you'd like to nuke the middle east. Hook, line, sinker - nice job!
Huh? Is that some kind of joke whose punchline went over my head?
If you'd said that Sarah Palin, with her rambling incoherence, is the Dan Quayle 2.0, I'd understand you. But Joe Biden? What exactly does he have in common with Quayle?
We're talking about the same Dan Quayle right? The one who is the sole reason that George W. Bush isn't the dumbest politician America has ever seen?
1. You did not provide any facts (at least not in the post I responded to; maybe you have in other posts in this topic, but I haven't been keeping very good track of who-said-what)
2. You don't seem to understand the definition of "moral equivalism". The things you are talking about are all completely different in nature: the scope of the issue, who was involved, what the circumstances were, during what time period they occurred, how controversial the details are, etc. They are all completely different. Trying to treat them all the same is moral equivalism, and it's just pointless.
It's ridiculous to me how many people always want to respond in discussions about muslim violence with statements about how "the US government does the same thing". First of all, it's not relevent to the discussion, it's off-topic and just adds noise to an already noisy debate, and second of all, it's pointless to even try to make such comparisons because to do so is pointless moral equivalism.
I'm not going to argue with you whether or not it's more or less "OK" for the US government to kill people than muslims, because it's just such a stupid and pointless debate, and moreover, because it's off-topic. Your *wanting* it to be on topic because you want to complain about the US government does not make it on topic.
Can you ever remember saying to yourself in your dream, "that man has such a funny red hat", or any other similar statement that involved color? That would give an indication that you were perceiving colors during your dream, even though you can't reconstruct the image that you were perceiving from memory with sufficient clarity to perceive the color again.
I myself definitely have seen color in my dreams, almost all of them, and definitely remember specific colors all the time. That being said, my memories are always fuzzy to varying degrees, and a single dream will have a range of clarity in what I recall.
- Some of it I remember just as very high-level ideas, not specifics, example: "I was dreaming that there was a tornado coming", but without any specific images or other details.
- Some of it I remember as broken up sequences of events that I reconstruct into what "must have been" a coherent whole; example: "I heard a loud whooshing noise, looked in my back yard, and saw a tornado in the distance", "Some time after that, I was in my house and I knew that the tornado was just outside and I had to get downstairs", "Later, there were a bunch of people I didn't know in my house and we were looking at the broken furniture and stuff strewn everywhere and the roof was missing, I got the feeling that they had all come to my house for shelter from the tornado" - while all of these are mere snapshots of what would have been presumably a complete experience with all of the gaps filled in, I don't remember what happened between the short segments of dream that I recall. But I do have an overwhelming feeling that there was a continuity, I just can't recall it.
- Some of it I remember as very detailed snapshots, just a mere moment in which all of my senses were engaged in a coherent and whole perception: "the window was open, I could feel the wind blowing in on my face, I felt an intense dread and fear as I watched the tornado spinning towards my house, the tornado was white and grey, a tall funnel cloud that moved slowly towards me, it was clearly late afternoon and the sky was dark and everything had a very eerie and surreal quality. The grass was green and I could see trees behind the tornado. The window sill was white and there was slightly golden glow from the sun behind the thick black clouds". From these snapshots I know that my dream included specific sensory experiences like color, texture, the feel of my body, smells, etc.
My memories of any particular dream will always have a mixture of these components, to varying degrees. All of these different levels of dream recall convince me that dreams, while I am experiencing them:
- Have moments of great coherency, but also large stretches of nonlinearness and just strange leaps of logic and perception
- Include detailed perceptions from all five senses, although definitely not always coherent, and not all senses are stimulated all the time
- Often are very lengthy, but often the dream changes its nature almost completely between parts
- Often have strong emotional compoenents
- Sometimes have uncanny consistency that one would think could only be driven by a plot that was already laid out before I even dreamed it. For example, sometimes I dream something early in a dream that doesn't make any sense at all until later in the dream, when I realize the reason for what I dreamt earlier. Sometimes these are so sophisticated and intertwined that it is impossible to think that me dream didn't have some idea "where it was going" before I even dreamed it
- Usually I participate actively in the experience, making decisions and acting on them, in ways that are both affected by, and affect, the outcome of the dream as it unfolds
I think that everyone experiences dreams in these same ways, to a large degree, the main difference being:
- How much you "care" about dreams, which affects how much effort your subconscious mind puts into participating your dreams. I honestly believe that you only have really vivid and co
I sincerely doubt that your mind created the perception of coherent colors while you were watching a black and white TV.
I think it's much more likely that two factors are at work:
1. Cloudy memory due to the gap of time between now and when you were a child combined with the fact that children don't have very good memories anyway
2. When you were a child, you may not have noticed the difference between black and white and color programs because you were not paying any attention to that aspect of your experience
Even today, my wife, who is in her 30's, says she can't tell the difference between standard definition and high definition programming. I know that she really can, but when she watches TV, it's just not something that she pays any attention to. So left to her own devices, her memory of watching a program doesn't retain any perception of the video quality of the program. If I were to sit down with her and show her a standard def program and a high def side by side (or even one after the other on the same set), we'd be able to talk through the differences, which I am certain she could notice and appreciate if instructed to do so. So when her attention is specifically directed by an outside influence to video quality, she can perceive the difference. But her mind does not normally notice such things so on her own, her experience of watching a program has no component which is related to video quality, and furthermore, what she remembers about it loses any small amount of perception of video quality that she might have had at the time she was watching it.
I use her as an example, but I think that every single person does the same sort of thing with numerous aspects of perception all the time.
I think that when you were a kid, if someone had shown you black and white TV and color TV side by side, you clearly would have seen the difference. But when you were left to your own devices, watching that black and white TV, you didn't pay any attention to the hues you were perceiving on the screen. So if afterwards someone asked you (or you asked yourself) whether or not you had watched a color or black and white TV program, you would have replied based on what you had assumed about your experience, rather than what you had actually perceived.
Color vs. black-and-white is definitely a pretty big thing to just sweep under the rug of perception, but I think it really is the same as much more subtle aspects to what we perceive, like video quality, just to a different degree. And I think that being a kid, with the inherent lack of maturity of thought and perception of childhood, you were more able to filter that part of your experience out than you would be today as an adult, which is why it seems so strange and impossible now to think that you could have done that back then.
No, I mean exactly what I said: your argument is moral equivalism bullshit.
Wow, the "moral equivalism" bullshit response. I didn't see that one coming .
That was a truly awesome post. I have a sincere admiration for your ability to clearly, comprehensively, accurately, and with great patience and clear wording, lay out the facts. I wish I could do the same - but I get so frustrated with people like the O.P. to whom you were responding; no matter how much rational and coherent argument you present, as you have, they always seem to come back with the same tired and inaccurate hyperbole. Kudos to you for rising above, and keep it up, for those of us who lack the patience to do so ourselves!
I do believe what I am saying. And yes, you are right, you might as well not vote; it really won't matter. That is to say, it will not matter with regards to the outcome of the election. But it does matter for other reasons. It is one of those things that is morally obligated in a democratic society; we are all responsible for casting our votes because this is how the democracy operates. Similarly to how we're all morally obligated to pick up a piece of trash that we see on the street, to make the world a better place, even though that one piece of trash is not going to have a significant impact on the planet as a whole (although picking up a piece of trash is even more important than voting, because that piece of trash can have significant effects on the local environment, whereas voting for president of the USA has only one insignificant nation-wide effect).
To put it bluntly: your vote will not affect the outcome of the election. Even if votes were counted perfectly, it is statistically impossible. Then consider that if the vote counting ever did come down to N votes for candidate A versus N+1 votes for candidate B, you can be pretty sure that there will be lots and lots of fudging going on to try to win the election for one candidate instead of the other (as we can see in your 2000 election example, where even the closest election in USA history still came down to hundreds/thousands of votes, so still your single vote wouldn't have decided the outcome, and yet in the end who voted for whom didn't matter as much as how the political process unfolded with regards to deciding the winner), making your one vote even less significant.
So given that, a personal motivation to cast one's vote not for whom one wants to win, but the best choice of whom one thinks is most likely to win, has no logical basis. Consider:
I really want candidate C from a third party to win. The chances that whether or not they will win depends on whether or not I vote for them is infinitesimally small, for all intents and purposes 0. And yet, even if I decide to vote for candidate B from a major party, who is my favorite choice from the candidates most likely to win, the chance that my vote will alter the outcome of the election is ALSO infinitesimally small, for all intents and purposes 0.
So the burden of proof is on you to show why it makes any sense to vote for your second choice candidate instead of your first choice candidate, when the expected outcome from one's actions cannot be used as a justification for voting one way instead of the other.
I think that in any democracy, people should always vote for whom they WANT to win, instead of whom they perceive as the best choice of those candidates whom they perceive as MOST LIKELY to win. Thus the most popular candidate will always be elected, and third parties will flourish, something that would have the greatest positive impact on USA politics imaginable. I think that the same moral obligation that compels us to vote even when our single vote is insignificant, compels us to vote for the candidate that we most want to win, regardless of what party they are from or what we perceive as their chances of winning the election.
Once again: is your vote going to change the outcome of the election? If so, vote for the third-party candidate you want to win, and you will be happy that your vote chose the candidate you liked. If not, then why bother voting for the candidate that you don't like, if it's not going to matter either way?
As I said before, the only way your logic makes any sense is if your vote somehow affects the outcome of the election only if you cast it for your preferred candidate from the two major parties. That is statistically impossible. The election will not come down to a single vote, your vote, deciding the outcome.
This is where people start to invoke the "but if everyone did what you say" arguments, which like I pointed out earlier, are meaningless. You can't control what everyone else is going to do. So why should it affect how you decide to vote?
"I'm not clear on if you agree that plurality voting is problematic or not. In this election you either vote for Obama or McCain or if you prefer a third party candidate you vote for that candidate AND EFFECTIVELY GIVE A VOTE AGAINST YOUR preference of McCain or Obama. Again, this has been explained elsewhere much better than I can do here."
I agree that plurality voting is problematic. I sincerely believe that changing the voting mechanisms of the USA would have a far greater positive long-term effect on the politics of the USA than anything else we could do. I think a system where everyone could rank the candidates in order of preference and submit that ranking as a vote, and a metric for choosing the winner as the one who satisfies the most people (i.e. the candidate who gets 90% of the 'second place' votes would win over a candidate who got 40% of the 'first place' votes), would increase the viability of third parties in the USA to the extent that there would no longer be a simple two-party system. And this would eliminate the vast majority of the problems that exist in politics in the USA. The net result would be of greater benefit to the USA than just about anything else that we could do.
As to your point about a vote for a third party being a vote against your preferred candidate from the two major parties ... I don't quite understand it. It's also true that a vote for one of the two major parties is a vote against your preferred third party candidate. How should these facts affect your decision about who to vote for? Since the logic works both ways, I don't think they should affect your decisions at all.
First off, you're an asshole for even trying to play that 'holier than thou' card.
Second, unless you are planning on selling your investments in the short term, you can't say that the current drop in value will have any material effect on your investment. My investments are also down considerably, but I don't expect to sell them off for 30+ years so I don't get too excited about what is happening in the short term. Anyone who actually understands investing realizes that it's much better for them that the financial industries of the country be strong and efficient; this is what drives investment values higher over time. A weak financial system will produce weak results. And yet this bailout is nothing other than a HUGE gift to the least efficient and least deserving parts of the financial industry. And it is people like yourself who cry about the short term value of their investments that are making this whole mess happen.
It's not clear from what you've written whether or not you believe that they will ultimately be able to do this. But if you do, then you ought to re-think your position. Do you honestly believe that the government is somehow going to do better with this 700 billion dollar investment than the market would have? The government has bought bad debt and will not recover a fraction of its value. The 700+ billion dollars was just gifted to corporations that made bad loans. The taxpayer will never see this money again.
Your logic on voting is flawed.
Do you believe that your vote will have a significant chance of affecting the election outcome? If so, why wouldn't you vote for the person you WANT to have in office?
Or do you believe that your vote will not have a significant chance of affecting the election outcome? If so, why do you think it's more important to cast an insignificant vote for the more likely to win candidate than the candidate you prefer? After all, your vote won't really matter either way, right?
You can't have it both ways. You can't say that your vote matters but that it only matters if you cast it for a certain party. That's just ridiculous.
Also, although you didn't say this, the other logical fallacy with regards to voting is when people invoke the "but if everyone did that" argument. You can't control what everyone does, so whether or not everyone else will or won't do it shouldn't affect your own judgement about how to vote. The idea that you should do something because 'if everyone did it' the outcome would be different, is just ridiculous. If you control everyone else, then by all means, make them vote how you want them to. But you don't control everyone else, so you should vote according to who YOU want to win, not who everyone ELSE wants to win. If someone says to me, 'you're voting third party? But if everyone who voted third party voted for candidate N, then we'd have a real chance of winning! Why are you wasting your vote on a third party instead of helping us get candidate N into office?", the only sensible reply is, "You're voting for candidate N? But if everyone who voted for candidate N voted third party instead, then we'd have a real chance of winning!" You see what I did there? The argument works just as well both ways.
All that being said, I'm voting for Obama this year after having voted Libertarian in every election that I was able to vote in previously (starting in 1992). I just like him as a candidate, and libertarianism has lost some of its sheen as I've thought more about it over the years. But I'm not voting for Obama because I feel like it's a more or less effective use of my vote. It's who I honestly want to win, and I think that every person should vote with the same motivation.
I do agree with you that a fundamental change to the voting system would be the single most effective way to improve the state of American politics though. Being able to rank candidates and vote for many at once would quickly destroy the two-party system that is strangling US politics.
I don't know very much about the actual causes of this issue, however I do find it really annoying that someone must invariably turn the discussion into an "it's the Democrats' fault! No, it's the Republicans' fault!" waste of time. You cited only Democratic presidents (and president hopefuls) in your post. I find it VERY hard to believe that there isn't blame to be place on just about every politician out there, regardless of party. So why do you feel the need to try to make this issue partisan? It's attitudes like yours that turn intelligent discussion into useless time sinks, which is the root cause of the USA's political environment being so dysfunctional.
In short: if voters use their brains, then they will elect politicians who use their brains. You are encouraging voters not to use their brains with arguments like yours. So you and people like you are the real root of the problem.
If you checked and discovered that your comments were irrelevent before you posted, why on god's green earth did you then go and click 'submit'. The correct choice would have been your browser's "back" button ...
I've had my own vanity domain for about 10 years now ... it's may last name. So my email address is my-first-name@my-last-name.com. I thought back then that it would be cool and all and that it would carry some 'cachet' as you said. In fact, it hasn't really mattered at all. 100% of people that I give my email address to could not care less what the actual text of the email address is. Also, none of those people that I thought would come out of the woodwork now that they have a way to easily find me, have done so. Maybe if I was more popular in high school or something ...
So to summarize: don't bother. Nobody actually cares what your email address is, despite what you may think. Even business associates won't care.
"Do you feel that a Principal should be able to suspend/expel the kid from school for throwing rocks at his house?"
If the kid posted a video on YouTube of him/herself doing it, then yes, because at that point the kid is involving the entire student body (or attempting to anyway) in his or her prank.
Definitely what is or isn't a school-related incident is up for interpretation, and you can choose any arbitrarily grey example you want to, but I don't think that makes the issue black and white.
Both your and my arguments seem to come down to whether or not you think that the incident is sufficiently clearly school related to be within the jurisdiction of the principle. I think it is, because I think of school as being a larger entity than just the physical boundaries of the school yard. When kids are in school, school is a significant fraction of their lives, and likewise, a significant fraction of a kids' life is school-related, even when they are not actually on school grounds. That's the way I see it. Your viewpoint is that school-related issues are only those issues which occur on school property during school hours. I am not sure that there is any specific logical argument that one could make in favor of one or the other position, they are just different viewpoints, each with some valid arguments behind them. At this point I would say it comes down to what judges, and by extension (hopefully) most people, think about this issue.
Your examples of injudicious use of disciplinary force by school officials are not, in my opinion, arguments against a rigid policy of respect towards the school. They are arguments for some oversight of teacher behavior, but just because some teachers abuse their power does not mean that teachers should not be given significant leeway in assigning punishment for bad student behavior. Sure, some teachers are going to do the wrong thing, but dealing with such issues on a case-by-case basis is, to me, much preferrable to weakening the entire school system to the extent that the system can no longer function, which is what I think has been happening for the past generation or two.
If one of the things that you mentioned as abusive behavior were done to my kid, I would:
1) Tell my kid that the teacher was out of line, but that they (my kid) was ultimately responsible for the situation by doing whatever wrong thing they weren't supposed to have done. Even if a teacher is out of line, if they are not grossly wrong, I will back the teacher. So my kid has their feelings hurt? They'll get over it, but the lesson of respect in the educational environment, and that they should focus on their studies and stay out of such trouble, is a much more important lesson to get out of such a situation.
2) Talk to the teacher personally about the problem with the aim of letting the teacher know that they stepped over the line so that next time, they won't. If this particular teacher becomes a repeat offender in clear cases of overstepping their disciplinary bounds, then I will take it up with the principle, school board, whoever necessary to see corrective action taken.
I guess my attitude comes from my inherent belief that the vast majority of teachers are struggling with kids with discipline problems at school and in such a situation, there will always be some collateral damage. Teachers cannot do their jobs perfectly at any time, and it is much harder when there are disruptive influences in the classroom. If my kid is in any way a contributor to that ... well, I'd come down much harder on my kid, who is causing problems, then any teacher, any day.
I was a teenager once, I know what kids do. They try to get away with whatever they can. If some get slapped down hard because of it sometimes, then so be it. This is not carte blanche for teachers to do whatever they want, but ... I'm pretty sure that the vast, vast, VAST majority of teachers are not going to school every day looking to cause problems. But there are a significant number of kids who are. So I side with the teachers.
I'm not sure that they, or anyone for that matter, feel that they can compete with stolen goods. People who steal movies online are unlikely to pay for any format, because they can always just download for free.
I'm not innocent of this kind of theft myself; I recently watched an NFL football game rebroadcast via something called 'sopcast', clearly violating the copyright of the NFL and CBS. I feel kind of bad about it, and there is no real justification despite the fact that you simply cannot get these games in my local (New Zealand) market.
"Unfortunately, very few parents actually do this it seems today. Someone's got to take up the slack unless we want a generation of moral and ethical cripples."
And what's worse, people like the O.P. believe that only THEY have any moral right to discipline their own children. I am not sure exactly where they get this idea, or how they manage to speak about it as if it's such an obvious truth.
By the way, we already have a generation of moral and ethical cripples, we've had generations of them in fact, and it's because of attitudes like those of the O.P.