Lets just agree that the school system as it stands is broken - we could have hours of conversation on why, lets avoid it and rather as a society drop the fingers and pick our selves up and do it right, and realize there is no such thing as a quick fix.
the opportunities exist for that person just as others - some are out of reach, things that are for people of means, but it doesn't matter who you are there is always a way out of a slum, the longer you tell your self there isn't, the longer you participate in them, the more you will believe and there for create the trapped world that so many people feel they live in.
I know that this is/., so this may seem out of line - I agree completely with all of this.
We got into this discussion in regards to racism, slavery, and their legacies. Given all of our other conversation, I just wanted to bring it back and say that although everything said above is true, I think that there is room in the conversation for us to do something proactive to address these inequalities, which have very ugly historical roots. The hard part is deciding what to do, and making sure that what we do actually helps, which is not simple, easy, or obvious.
no it isn't.. Just as you pointed out the KKK - i can point to several areas in this down that i would NEVER venture in at night, and the reason is because i'm white.
I'm not sure how this statement follows from the text you quoted. I was simply calling for a balance between two extreme views, but it sounds like you are arguing that racism exists in many directions (a fact I would never dispute). I'm I missing something?
I am a firm believer that you are what you work for. I would count my self as lower-mid middle class, all my parents did was provide a roof and meals
And even this is a lot more than some children get.
I completely agree that nobody should ever be given a free ride, and that long-term handouts are total wastes of money. At the same time, what should we, as a society, do in response to people (regardless of race) who start off in an environment where they lack even basic food and security? If a child finds him/herself in such a situation, there is a good chance that they are going to a horrible, underfunded school where there is essentially zero chance of getting an education. My wife worked for a while in New Orleans, and some schools there didn't even have books - how can you learn anything in that environment?
What opportunities exist for that person? How can that person even know of those opportunities?
Please don't get me wrong - I fully believe that if a person doesn't contribute to society, they should fail. That's a hard truth that a lot of folks on the left have a hard time with. At the same time, as a society we must make sure that there are reasonable opportunities available for everyone, which is a hard goal.
something that someone did to someone else 4+ generations ago is not an excuse for your failings/situation today.
No, there is no excuse for anybody's failings/situation today. At the same time, what happened 4+ generations ago still can have an impact on people's lives today, especially when institutionalized racism (ie, segregation, etc.) still existed ~1-2 generations ago. Also, while no longer government sanctioned, there is still widespread , organized racism in the U.S.
Ultimately, the fate of anybody is in their own hands, but that fact does not absolve the rest of society from any responsibility. In the end, though, there needs to be some kind of balance between the attitude of "It's their problem, they should deal with it" and the attitude of "It's all the fault of the white man and group X can do no wrong."
While you're at it, why don't you mention that unions bussed their rent-a-mobs into Wisconsin, in contrast to Tea Party rallies where most participants are there on their own volition.
I would if it were true. The narrative that you just presented is exactly the kind of media distortion that is the problem. Yes, it is true that the unions organized buses to transport people from the general area to Madison for the protests, but the Tea Party people also showed up on buses.
From my personal experiences in talking with people, I never talked to someone who was NOT from Wisconsin (although I'm sure there were people from out of state there), and everybody was there because of their own personal reasons. Quite frankly, the narrative of "rent-a-mob" has no basis in reality. Perhaps some of the people there came on paid vacation or some such thing, which gives enough of a grain of truth to allow the pundits to say, "The protesters were paid to be there," but the ground truth doesn't bear it out.
Instead, as you walked around, you saw an extraordinarily peaceful protest, which included many families and children. Never was there any sense of danger or conflict, despite emotions often running high.
Your impression is exactly the point that I'm trying to make - our media failed. For example, at one of the protests, the crowd was about 95% against Gov. Walker and his policies with about 5% showing up to voice support. In the media, though, it was reported as, "XXX people came out today in support and opposed to the bill."
Those kinds of distortions were extremely common. My experiences of what I saw on the ground rarely matched the narrative that came out of the media. Let me ask you - other than being "protesting the stripping of collective bargaining right" do you have any idea why people were out there? Here's a hint - it is much more complicated than that single sound bite. It was much more about how a long-standing trend towards erosion of worker's rights has led to a shrinking middle class, which has led to a recession, which has led to budget issues, which led to the draconian measures put forth by the current administration, but even that summary is a fairly trite, simplistic overview.
Try watching this video and hear other people express why they were there, and try to start questioning everything you hear in the news, especially the reports that confirm your own political biases.
The reason it isn't getting much coverage in the major media is because it is a couple hundred dirty twenty-somethings (I'm barely not a dirty twenty-something, judgement not particularly intended) complaining that a bunch of rich people are rich.
Please don't be so sure. If you recall earlier this past year, there were massive protests in Wisconsin. As someone who personally took place in a lot of them, I know that our media is terrible. For example, during these protests, the rallies were larger than the biggest Tea Party rally ever, even though it was during a snowstorm in Wisconsin in February. That certainly strikes me as news, but when you turned on CNN, all you saw was a 10-second sound bite on Wisconsin, followed by a 3-minute long piece on the history of the Tea Party in US politics. (I don't have links handy.)
Personally, I don't know enough of the ground truth of what is happening on Wall St. to comment, but I very highly suspect that anything that has been said on any major network news is woefully inaccurate at best.
You got a house for nothing. How is that not entirely profit.
If there is a mortgage on the house, the amount of profit may not be that much.
If we discard the mortgage, though, I fail to see how you're arguing with me. Somebody gets a house for nothing, and you're claiming that we shouldn't tax capital gains like income because it is harder to make a lot of money on the house the person got for nothing.
Let's stay on point here - the proposal on the table is to tax capital gains like income. Why shouldn't we?
Huh? Your scenario is ridiculous. In what you propose, I would end up paying more taxes certainly, but the rest of your argument doesn't follow, especially since I would only pay taxes on the profit. If there is little profit, I pay little tax, but if I make a killing (most likely), I would end up paying a lot in tax, but I would also walk away with a big, fat wad of cash.
Sorry, I still say that it isn't fair for the wealthiest to pay a smaller percentage of their income than the middle class (as it currently stands), and you have provided absolutely no argument to the contrary.
I can tell you right now that if I'm told I will be paying 90% of what I make will be taken in the form of taxes, there's no fucking point in me spending 100+ hours a week earning that money.
Well, then it's great that nobody is saying anything like this. The specific proposal from Obama is that millionaires should be the same rate as the middle class. This is done by changing capital gains tax to match income tax.
Put aside all of the rest of the rhetoric and tell me how that one, specific suggestion isn't a good idea.
Actually yes; that plus a business loan if he has a good idea.
History is rife with people who have done pretty much that.
Unfortunately, "plus a business loan" is often much more complicated than it sounds, especially for someone who 1) has little (ie, poor) credit and who 2) works a low wage. Yes, there are plenty of examples of people starting billion dollar companies in their garage, but those are rare stories.
Don't get me wrong - the fact that it is *possible* is great. In my mind that is one of the greatest things about a capitalistic society. The key to making it work, though, is that people need that access to credit, and in the current implementation of capitalism in the US, it is harder and harder for the people with great ideas to get the needed capital.
Under capitalism, you can have companies that exploit workers but if they do that too much workers are free to leave and start new companies that start afresh... at least you have that ability as long as regulations do not impose too heavy a burden to start a new company to compete.
So, what you're saying is that if a worker being paid minimum wage to work an assembly line isn't happy, he has the total freedom to open up his own factory, using the vast wealth and credit he has built up as a minimum wage worker.
This is technically true, but scale matters. A lot. For someone earning minimum wage, how long will it take them to save enough money to, say, open their own business? Compare that to someone who is earning millions each year.
Even your examples of how to save money reveal your flaws. You mention living with your parents, but what about people whose parents are absent from their lives? You mention giving up some free time to collect cans, but what about those who are already working multiple, minimum wage jobs and don't have any free time to give up? From the sounds of it, you come from a place of privilege (as do I - my family helped pay for college, among other things), and I think that it would do you well to remember that there are some places in the US where people live in abject poverty and have very minimal options.
The blog that you reference makes some interesting points about the merits of spending vs. saving, but trying to cram all of history and economics into this simple divide is naive at best and dangerously foolish at worst. The danger comes from the inherent assumption that all people in poverty are there through their own laziness and "debtor" mentality.
Except - in the developed world at least - there just aren't many evolutionary pressures any more.
Nonsense. It is true that through science, etc. we have drastically reduced mortality rate, but just because you're alive, that doesn't mean that you've reproduced. In the end, evolution is all about reproduction, and whatever traits make you more likely to reproduce are the traits that are constantly under selective pressure.
Where is this leading? If we look to nature for what happens when a population finds itself in an environment that is rich in food resources and scarce on predators, I immediately think of the birds of paradise and bower birds in New Guinea. There, the birds of paradise evolved fantastic plumage to attract mates, and the bower birds developed the ability to create what can easily be viewed as an art installation.
Obviously, humans are not birds, so we need to be careful in extrapolating too much from these examples. My point, though, is that even absent threats to survival, competition for mates is still fierce and that competition is a strong evolutionary pressure.
You are posting as AC, so this reply may be in vain, but here goes:
First of all, regarding your questions about the Big Bang, you ask very important and significant questions. At this point, science has no answer for you. The fact that we can even make theories and models about the Big Bang is that those models, etc. are consistent with what we can observe in the universe. (see the xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/54/, which shows how the observed microwave radiation fit nearly perfectly to the predicted model). The questions you pose regarding why the Big Bang happened are not scientific questions, and if you chose to believe in a theological explanation, that viewpoint is entirely consistent with science.
As for your examples of the difficulties of life arising from things that aren't alive, here again is a set of questions for which science has not produced any conclusive answers. That isn't to say that there aren't plausible hypotheses, though. I think that one of the difficulties that many people face when trying to imagine this origin is that we tend to think of the early life in terms of the life we have around today. Specifically, the argument is often that life in the form of a single cell is too complex and too improbable to have spontaneously formed. As it turns out, science agrees with you on that. In fact, a lot of the current thinking is that early "life" started more as a collection of something like self-replicating RNA molecules, and only through a long period of time (ie, millions to billions of years) these simple molecules managed to become more complicated.
Unfortunately, though, it is nearly impossible for science to make any conclusions about this pathway. We've seen basic organic molecules (ie, chains of carbon) form very easily in the lab, which leads to the hypotheses that simple molecules start coming together and eventually manage to form a single cell, which was a very large, significant step in the history of life that took a long time to happen. Again, though, since this period of time is so difficult for us to study and examine, not much is known about it, from the scientific perspective. Again, if you chose to believe that some divine force swooped in and "breathed life" into the basic molecules to get things started, that is entirely consistent with the scientific understanding.
The sardine can example is not directly analogous. First of all, the blend of molecules and chemistry inside that can is very different from the early earth, but most importantly, we need to keep in mind that this early step took millions and millions of years to form a single cell - it nothing that we would expect to form in a sardine can from the time it is canned to the time it is opened.
As for the challenge to find fossilizing fish, this is easily done - look on the bottom of the ocean near where there is accumulating sediment. In other words, not along the shore or where people routinely go.
It is definitely true that people are looking for the Higgs Boson based upon faith, but the trouble is that faith is an overloaded word.
The faith in science asks you to take nothing for granted. You can ask, "Why do we think the Higgs Boson exists?" and, eventually, this line of questioning will drill down to a point that references repeatable, reliable observations in the physical world. Now, it is true that most people (myself included) aren't going to go through that line of questioning and drill down into that level of detail, but a fundamental concept of science is that any statement is subject to questioning, testing, and review. What religious folks point to as "faith" in science ultimately boils down to faith in the peer-review process and its ability to (eventually) converge on the truth.
Contrast that to religion. Ultimately, religion makes claims that cannot be verified in the physical world and that ultimately come down to lines of reasoning like, "It is true because I feel it is true" or reference to the authority of tradition, often in the form of some kind of holy book. The final leap of faith is much larger, and for some, more extreme, religious claims, involves deliberately ignoring those repeatable facts of the physical world.
Ultimately, I agree with you that both science and religion rely upon a certain amount of faith, but do not think for a moment that this makes them the same.
One would suspect that the neighbors would, in their own self-interest, demand that you build your place strong enough to not do things like fall over, etc.
Indeed. It would be the most efficient if the building was made up to snuff to begin with. It would be great for the neighbors to insist that you build things correctly, but without some kind of authority, how can they do that? Perhaps you need some kind of authority that is representing the will of the whole neighborhood that everyone agrees is responsible. Doesn't that seem like a fairly efficient solution? Also doesn't that sound an awful lot like government?
When done right, government can be a very efficient solution. The trouble is that it is rarely done right, which is why we need to start demanding more transparency and accountability from the government in order to fix the system we have. Just chucking out the whole system leaves a hole that will be filled with something else just as bad.
Each individual is entitled to as much of the product of their own labor and intellect as is feasible
I'm fine with this if a person can succeed completely on their own without any help from others. In other words, they need to grow their own food, make their own tools, mine their own ore, etc., etc.
The fundamental fallacy of the libertarian ideal is that people are independent entities. This is completely false. For my day to day existence, I depend tremendously upon a very large number of people. Just look around you. What percentage of the items around you did you make entirely on your own? My guess is none. Even if you built everything yourself, you almost certainly used tools made by somebody else.
Another flaw to the argument is the idea that everybody earns what they are paid. For some of the top earners at hedge funds, they can take home MILLIONS in a day, far more than the lifetime earnings of a teacher. Do you honestly think that a hedge fund manager contributes more to society in a DAY than a teacher does in a lifetime? I'm not saying that everybody should be paid the same - there are clearly examples of types of work and sets of skills whose true value is greater than others. My point is that income is often not a measure of how much value a person contributes - it is more a measure of how close they sit to money.
Yet another fallacy to your idea is the concept that wealth is a linear scale. It isn't. In order to survive, there is a fundamental minimum requirement, which many people struggle to meet. Beyond that, there is a range where people can comfortably survive, but they are not able to advance themselves. Beyond that, there is what I'm guessing most/.ers lie - a range of income where basic comforts can be easily met, with money left over to pursue different interests. Somewhere far down the scale, there exists a class of people who rarely work and who have so much wealth, they can spend the yearly earnings of other people to buy a fancy watch. The whole idea of a progressive tax system acknowledges this non-linearity and asks those who are taking the most from society (ie, the rich) to give back proportionally more.
So, fundamentally, I agree with you - a person should be able to keep what they earn, but that is very, very different from saying that they get to keep all of the money that they take in, especially when they depend so greatly on others for that money to keep flowing. Furthermore, as a general rule, the more money you take home, the more people you depend on to make sure that you keep getting paid.
I work in biotech, and I write a lot of scientifically-geared code. Whenever I have tried to "just bang out" a piece of code, I find that as soon as it starts to break past a few screen-fulls of code, taking the time to write more modularity will save me time in the end. Even if you don't write the general, all-purpose, completely flexible in every way piece of code, just breaking it down into smaller functions/objects that each handle a small part of the general problem makes the code more readable and easier to debug.
Perhaps one the differences here is that I also find that almost invariably the "one-off" script turns out to be useful again and again, so if I cut corners immediately, I'll end up paying the price in time further down the road.
Re: full screen apps.
It may sound like a gimmick, and to a certain extent it is. At the same time, though, a while back I was working on a fairly technical document, and I started writing it in Pages full screen mode. In this view, everything that wasn't my own content just disappears from the default view. I can easily mouse up to the top of the screen to see a menu, etc. if I need it, but for the most part, I only see the content I'm working on.
The result? Without all of the distractions, I found that I could really just focus on my content and get things done. It was way, way better than I would have ever expected.
So, yeah, I'm a fan of the option of a full-screen app, especially any time you have a single document that requires focus.
You talk about how you never went to a public school, and did two years of private school. By this, I think it is safe to assume that you had financially stable parents (maybe even well-off) that made a choice to value your education and invest their own resources and lives into helping you get an education. Good for you. I honestly mean that, even though it can easily come across as a sarcastic snip - I think the world would be a lot better off if every parent took their role as a parent seriously.
What about the family where both parents work in order to feed their children? What about children who have parents that don't give a shit about them? While it is certainly true that *some* of them will be self-motivated enough to rise about their situations without outside help, the overwhelming majority won't.
The unfortunate reality is that some kids live in a home environment that is outright hostile towards any kind of learning. Our choice as a society is to either try to educate them as children, to give them a chance at life, or we can just lock them in prison when they inevitably run into trouble when the figure out that society doesn't give a shit about them. That is the point of the article - prisons are a poor investment in the future, but schools are a great investment in the future. Meanwhile, we are putting a lot more money per person into locking people up as opposed to educating them.
There are no real "Evil" people outside fiction - the typical vilain that purposefully hurts other for no reason other than making them hurt does not exit in real life.
If you exclude people with certifiable mental illnesses, I will agree with you, but there is a very, very small fraction of the population that is bloodthirsty, cruel, and vindictive, just for giggles.
In general, though, I agree with you that the overwhelming majority of people who commit horrible acts are just trying to get by and to survive. This is why war is so complicated.
The issue is more complicated than you paint it. Although there are certainly people in the media out there who are lazy, irresponsible, dishonest, etc., there are also people out there who are honestly trying to do the best job that they can. The trouble is that in this day and age of consolidation and cost-cutting, those who are trying to do good work can't.
Since reporters are stretched too thin with their bosses breathing down their necks to get something out *right now*, there is often very little time to do all of the due diligence on a story that they might like. The result is that whenever a company/government organization puts out a press release, there may be just enough time to do some basic fact-checking, but there is rarely enough time to verify that the press release is a fair and accurate depiction of the situation.
Compound this with the dropping revenues of news outlets, and you're left with a system that rewards sensationalism and that can't afford to provide good news.
My only hope is that more distributed, peer reviewed approach to the news can emerge. There are already sites like wikinews.org or globalvoicesonline.org or publicnewsforum.org which are taking steps towards such a thing, but none of these seems to be really taking off. Right now, though, the good side is that if you are diligent about searching blogs, etc., you can actually find out a lot about what is going on, especially if you know enough to impose a mental filter when reading anything online. The downside is that we are drowning in noise, where only the big money entities have the resources to speak out.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that this is /., so this may seem out of line - I agree completely with all of this.
We got into this discussion in regards to racism, slavery, and their legacies. Given all of our other conversation, I just wanted to bring it back and say that although everything said above is true, I think that there is room in the conversation for us to do something proactive to address these inequalities, which have very ugly historical roots. The hard part is deciding what to do, and making sure that what we do actually helps, which is not simple, easy, or obvious.
I'm not sure how this statement follows from the text you quoted. I was simply calling for a balance between two extreme views, but it sounds like you are arguing that racism exists in many directions (a fact I would never dispute). I'm I missing something?
And even this is a lot more than some children get.
I completely agree that nobody should ever be given a free ride, and that long-term handouts are total wastes of money. At the same time, what should we, as a society, do in response to people (regardless of race) who start off in an environment where they lack even basic food and security? If a child finds him/herself in such a situation, there is a good chance that they are going to a horrible, underfunded school where there is essentially zero chance of getting an education. My wife worked for a while in New Orleans, and some schools there didn't even have books - how can you learn anything in that environment?
What opportunities exist for that person? How can that person even know of those opportunities?
Please don't get me wrong - I fully believe that if a person doesn't contribute to society, they should fail. That's a hard truth that a lot of folks on the left have a hard time with. At the same time, as a society we must make sure that there are reasonable opportunities available for everyone, which is a hard goal.
No, there is no excuse for anybody's failings/situation today. At the same time, what happened 4+ generations ago still can have an impact on people's lives today, especially when institutionalized racism (ie, segregation, etc.) still existed ~1-2 generations ago. Also, while no longer government sanctioned, there is still widespread , organized racism in the U.S.
Ultimately, the fate of anybody is in their own hands, but that fact does not absolve the rest of society from any responsibility. In the end, though, there needs to be some kind of balance between the attitude of "It's their problem, they should deal with it" and the attitude of "It's all the fault of the white man and group X can do no wrong."
I would if it were true. The narrative that you just presented is exactly the kind of media distortion that is the problem. Yes, it is true that the unions organized buses to transport people from the general area to Madison for the protests, but the Tea Party people also showed up on buses.
From my personal experiences in talking with people, I never talked to someone who was NOT from Wisconsin (although I'm sure there were people from out of state there), and everybody was there because of their own personal reasons. Quite frankly, the narrative of "rent-a-mob" has no basis in reality. Perhaps some of the people there came on paid vacation or some such thing, which gives enough of a grain of truth to allow the pundits to say, "The protesters were paid to be there," but the ground truth doesn't bear it out.
Instead, as you walked around, you saw an extraordinarily peaceful protest, which included many families and children. Never was there any sense of danger or conflict, despite emotions often running high.
Your impression is exactly the point that I'm trying to make - our media failed. For example, at one of the protests, the crowd was about 95% against Gov. Walker and his policies with about 5% showing up to voice support. In the media, though, it was reported as, "XXX people came out today in support and opposed to the bill."
Those kinds of distortions were extremely common. My experiences of what I saw on the ground rarely matched the narrative that came out of the media. Let me ask you - other than being "protesting the stripping of collective bargaining right" do you have any idea why people were out there? Here's a hint - it is much more complicated than that single sound bite. It was much more about how a long-standing trend towards erosion of worker's rights has led to a shrinking middle class, which has led to a recession, which has led to budget issues, which led to the draconian measures put forth by the current administration, but even that summary is a fairly trite, simplistic overview.
Try watching this video and hear other people express why they were there, and try to start questioning everything you hear in the news, especially the reports that confirm your own political biases.
And unfortunately, that's often the best information out there.
Generally, I don't think that the news is wrong, its more an issue that it is incomplete in crucial details.
Please don't be so sure. If you recall earlier this past year, there were massive protests in Wisconsin. As someone who personally took place in a lot of them, I know that our media is terrible. For example, during these protests, the rallies were larger than the biggest Tea Party rally ever, even though it was during a snowstorm in Wisconsin in February. That certainly strikes me as news, but when you turned on CNN, all you saw was a 10-second sound bite on Wisconsin, followed by a 3-minute long piece on the history of the Tea Party in US politics. (I don't have links handy.)
Personally, I don't know enough of the ground truth of what is happening on Wall St. to comment, but I very highly suspect that anything that has been said on any major network news is woefully inaccurate at best.
If there is a mortgage on the house, the amount of profit may not be that much.
If we discard the mortgage, though, I fail to see how you're arguing with me. Somebody gets a house for nothing, and you're claiming that we shouldn't tax capital gains like income because it is harder to make a lot of money on the house the person got for nothing.
Let's stay on point here - the proposal on the table is to tax capital gains like income. Why shouldn't we?
Huh? Your scenario is ridiculous. In what you propose, I would end up paying more taxes certainly, but the rest of your argument doesn't follow, especially since I would only pay taxes on the profit. If there is little profit, I pay little tax, but if I make a killing (most likely), I would end up paying a lot in tax, but I would also walk away with a big, fat wad of cash.
Sorry, I still say that it isn't fair for the wealthiest to pay a smaller percentage of their income than the middle class (as it currently stands), and you have provided absolutely no argument to the contrary.
Well, then it's great that nobody is saying anything like this. The specific proposal from Obama is that millionaires should be the same rate as the middle class. This is done by changing capital gains tax to match income tax.
Put aside all of the rest of the rhetoric and tell me how that one, specific suggestion isn't a good idea.
Unfortunately, "plus a business loan" is often much more complicated than it sounds, especially for someone who 1) has little (ie, poor) credit and who 2) works a low wage. Yes, there are plenty of examples of people starting billion dollar companies in their garage, but those are rare stories.
Don't get me wrong - the fact that it is *possible* is great. In my mind that is one of the greatest things about a capitalistic society. The key to making it work, though, is that people need that access to credit, and in the current implementation of capitalism in the US, it is harder and harder for the people with great ideas to get the needed capital.
So, what you're saying is that if a worker being paid minimum wage to work an assembly line isn't happy, he has the total freedom to open up his own factory, using the vast wealth and credit he has built up as a minimum wage worker.
I'll let you spot the flaw in that reasoning.
This is technically true, but scale matters. A lot. For someone earning minimum wage, how long will it take them to save enough money to, say, open their own business? Compare that to someone who is earning millions each year.
Even your examples of how to save money reveal your flaws. You mention living with your parents, but what about people whose parents are absent from their lives? You mention giving up some free time to collect cans, but what about those who are already working multiple, minimum wage jobs and don't have any free time to give up? From the sounds of it, you come from a place of privilege (as do I - my family helped pay for college, among other things), and I think that it would do you well to remember that there are some places in the US where people live in abject poverty and have very minimal options.
The blog that you reference makes some interesting points about the merits of spending vs. saving, but trying to cram all of history and economics into this simple divide is naive at best and dangerously foolish at worst. The danger comes from the inherent assumption that all people in poverty are there through their own laziness and "debtor" mentality.
Nonsense. It is true that through science, etc. we have drastically reduced mortality rate, but just because you're alive, that doesn't mean that you've reproduced. In the end, evolution is all about reproduction, and whatever traits make you more likely to reproduce are the traits that are constantly under selective pressure.
Where is this leading? If we look to nature for what happens when a population finds itself in an environment that is rich in food resources and scarce on predators, I immediately think of the birds of paradise and bower birds in New Guinea. There, the birds of paradise evolved fantastic plumage to attract mates, and the bower birds developed the ability to create what can easily be viewed as an art installation.
Obviously, humans are not birds, so we need to be careful in extrapolating too much from these examples. My point, though, is that even absent threats to survival, competition for mates is still fierce and that competition is a strong evolutionary pressure.
You are posting as AC, so this reply may be in vain, but here goes:
First of all, regarding your questions about the Big Bang, you ask very important and significant questions. At this point, science has no answer for you. The fact that we can even make theories and models about the Big Bang is that those models, etc. are consistent with what we can observe in the universe. (see the xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/54/, which shows how the observed microwave radiation fit nearly perfectly to the predicted model). The questions you pose regarding why the Big Bang happened are not scientific questions, and if you chose to believe in a theological explanation, that viewpoint is entirely consistent with science.
As for your examples of the difficulties of life arising from things that aren't alive, here again is a set of questions for which science has not produced any conclusive answers. That isn't to say that there aren't plausible hypotheses, though. I think that one of the difficulties that many people face when trying to imagine this origin is that we tend to think of the early life in terms of the life we have around today. Specifically, the argument is often that life in the form of a single cell is too complex and too improbable to have spontaneously formed. As it turns out, science agrees with you on that. In fact, a lot of the current thinking is that early "life" started more as a collection of something like self-replicating RNA molecules, and only through a long period of time (ie, millions to billions of years) these simple molecules managed to become more complicated.
Unfortunately, though, it is nearly impossible for science to make any conclusions about this pathway. We've seen basic organic molecules (ie, chains of carbon) form very easily in the lab, which leads to the hypotheses that simple molecules start coming together and eventually manage to form a single cell, which was a very large, significant step in the history of life that took a long time to happen. Again, though, since this period of time is so difficult for us to study and examine, not much is known about it, from the scientific perspective. Again, if you chose to believe that some divine force swooped in and "breathed life" into the basic molecules to get things started, that is entirely consistent with the scientific understanding.
The sardine can example is not directly analogous. First of all, the blend of molecules and chemistry inside that can is very different from the early earth, but most importantly, we need to keep in mind that this early step took millions and millions of years to form a single cell - it nothing that we would expect to form in a sardine can from the time it is canned to the time it is opened.
As for the challenge to find fossilizing fish, this is easily done - look on the bottom of the ocean near where there is accumulating sediment. In other words, not along the shore or where people routinely go.
It is definitely true that people are looking for the Higgs Boson based upon faith, but the trouble is that faith is an overloaded word.
The faith in science asks you to take nothing for granted. You can ask, "Why do we think the Higgs Boson exists?" and, eventually, this line of questioning will drill down to a point that references repeatable, reliable observations in the physical world. Now, it is true that most people (myself included) aren't going to go through that line of questioning and drill down into that level of detail, but a fundamental concept of science is that any statement is subject to questioning, testing, and review. What religious folks point to as "faith" in science ultimately boils down to faith in the peer-review process and its ability to (eventually) converge on the truth.
Contrast that to religion. Ultimately, religion makes claims that cannot be verified in the physical world and that ultimately come down to lines of reasoning like, "It is true because I feel it is true" or reference to the authority of tradition, often in the form of some kind of holy book. The final leap of faith is much larger, and for some, more extreme, religious claims, involves deliberately ignoring those repeatable facts of the physical world.
Ultimately, I agree with you that both science and religion rely upon a certain amount of faith, but do not think for a moment that this makes them the same.
Indeed. It would be the most efficient if the building was made up to snuff to begin with. It would be great for the neighbors to insist that you build things correctly, but without some kind of authority, how can they do that? Perhaps you need some kind of authority that is representing the will of the whole neighborhood that everyone agrees is responsible. Doesn't that seem like a fairly efficient solution? Also doesn't that sound an awful lot like government?
When done right, government can be a very efficient solution. The trouble is that it is rarely done right, which is why we need to start demanding more transparency and accountability from the government in order to fix the system we have. Just chucking out the whole system leaves a hole that will be filled with something else just as bad.
It certainly sounds like congress has gone down the rabbit hole...
I'm fine with this if a person can succeed completely on their own without any help from others. In other words, they need to grow their own food, make their own tools, mine their own ore, etc., etc.
The fundamental fallacy of the libertarian ideal is that people are independent entities. This is completely false. For my day to day existence, I depend tremendously upon a very large number of people. Just look around you. What percentage of the items around you did you make entirely on your own? My guess is none. Even if you built everything yourself, you almost certainly used tools made by somebody else.
Another flaw to the argument is the idea that everybody earns what they are paid. For some of the top earners at hedge funds, they can take home MILLIONS in a day, far more than the lifetime earnings of a teacher. Do you honestly think that a hedge fund manager contributes more to society in a DAY than a teacher does in a lifetime? I'm not saying that everybody should be paid the same - there are clearly examples of types of work and sets of skills whose true value is greater than others. My point is that income is often not a measure of how much value a person contributes - it is more a measure of how close they sit to money.
Yet another fallacy to your idea is the concept that wealth is a linear scale. It isn't. In order to survive, there is a fundamental minimum requirement, which many people struggle to meet. Beyond that, there is a range where people can comfortably survive, but they are not able to advance themselves. Beyond that, there is what I'm guessing most /.ers lie - a range of income where basic comforts can be easily met, with money left over to pursue different interests. Somewhere far down the scale, there exists a class of people who rarely work and who have so much wealth, they can spend the yearly earnings of other people to buy a fancy watch. The whole idea of a progressive tax system acknowledges this non-linearity and asks those who are taking the most from society (ie, the rich) to give back proportionally more.
So, fundamentally, I agree with you - a person should be able to keep what they earn, but that is very, very different from saying that they get to keep all of the money that they take in, especially when they depend so greatly on others for that money to keep flowing. Furthermore, as a general rule, the more money you take home, the more people you depend on to make sure that you keep getting paid.
Actually, I disagree.
I work in biotech, and I write a lot of scientifically-geared code. Whenever I have tried to "just bang out" a piece of code, I find that as soon as it starts to break past a few screen-fulls of code, taking the time to write more modularity will save me time in the end. Even if you don't write the general, all-purpose, completely flexible in every way piece of code, just breaking it down into smaller functions/objects that each handle a small part of the general problem makes the code more readable and easier to debug.
Perhaps one the differences here is that I also find that almost invariably the "one-off" script turns out to be useful again and again, so if I cut corners immediately, I'll end up paying the price in time further down the road.
Re: full screen apps. It may sound like a gimmick, and to a certain extent it is. At the same time, though, a while back I was working on a fairly technical document, and I started writing it in Pages full screen mode. In this view, everything that wasn't my own content just disappears from the default view. I can easily mouse up to the top of the screen to see a menu, etc. if I need it, but for the most part, I only see the content I'm working on. The result? Without all of the distractions, I found that I could really just focus on my content and get things done. It was way, way better than I would have ever expected. So, yeah, I'm a fan of the option of a full-screen app, especially any time you have a single document that requires focus.
Man... I had a great, long, insightful response to this, but Firefox just crashed.
It would still probably be a good idea to rewrite it, but after losing that work, I can't be arsed.
Instead, here is the short version: a lot of the time, people make decisions based more on emotions than on logic.
You talk about how you never went to a public school, and did two years of private school. By this, I think it is safe to assume that you had financially stable parents (maybe even well-off) that made a choice to value your education and invest their own resources and lives into helping you get an education. Good for you. I honestly mean that, even though it can easily come across as a sarcastic snip - I think the world would be a lot better off if every parent took their role as a parent seriously.
What about the family where both parents work in order to feed their children? What about children who have parents that don't give a shit about them? While it is certainly true that *some* of them will be self-motivated enough to rise about their situations without outside help, the overwhelming majority won't.
The unfortunate reality is that some kids live in a home environment that is outright hostile towards any kind of learning. Our choice as a society is to either try to educate them as children, to give them a chance at life, or we can just lock them in prison when they inevitably run into trouble when the figure out that society doesn't give a shit about them. That is the point of the article - prisons are a poor investment in the future, but schools are a great investment in the future. Meanwhile, we are putting a lot more money per person into locking people up as opposed to educating them.
That is messed up.
AND there will be natural genetic drift, which occurs in all populations. If it is alive, there is evolution happening.
If you exclude people with certifiable mental illnesses, I will agree with you, but there is a very, very small fraction of the population that is bloodthirsty, cruel, and vindictive, just for giggles.
In general, though, I agree with you that the overwhelming majority of people who commit horrible acts are just trying to get by and to survive. This is why war is so complicated.
The issue is more complicated than you paint it. Although there are certainly people in the media out there who are lazy, irresponsible, dishonest, etc., there are also people out there who are honestly trying to do the best job that they can. The trouble is that in this day and age of consolidation and cost-cutting, those who are trying to do good work can't.
Since reporters are stretched too thin with their bosses breathing down their necks to get something out *right now*, there is often very little time to do all of the due diligence on a story that they might like. The result is that whenever a company/government organization puts out a press release, there may be just enough time to do some basic fact-checking, but there is rarely enough time to verify that the press release is a fair and accurate depiction of the situation.
Compound this with the dropping revenues of news outlets, and you're left with a system that rewards sensationalism and that can't afford to provide good news.
My only hope is that more distributed, peer reviewed approach to the news can emerge. There are already sites like wikinews.org or globalvoicesonline.org or publicnewsforum.org which are taking steps towards such a thing, but none of these seems to be really taking off. Right now, though, the good side is that if you are diligent about searching blogs, etc., you can actually find out a lot about what is going on, especially if you know enough to impose a mental filter when reading anything online. The downside is that we are drowning in noise, where only the big money entities have the resources to speak out.