1920 x 1200 was becoming common for widescreen computer monitors before 1080p television panels became the norm, then monitors went to that just because production was easier. 16:10 makes more sense a monitor, I think. I was using 1600x1200 on a CRT before I upgraded to a LCD, and now with 1920x1080, I have actually LOST over 10% of my vertical space. It's nice for watching movies or maybe gaming, but for reading long pages of text, the extra vertical pixels are really nice. I feel like 16:10 is a nice compromise. I've seen my laptop (16:9) against a friend's macbook (16:10), and the 16:10 looks ways more natural. My screen looks kinda squished.
I'm currently a college student, and many of my professors are sensitive to textbook prices. One in particular, for computer science, refused to make us buy a textbook (because they were a rip off), and instead provided his own materials on his website. For general physics, there were also modules online, and our professor said the textbook was optional, and suggested we buy and older edition if we wanted one, to save money. My differential equations professor provided homework assignments for both the current AND previous edition of the textbook, so that students could save money buying a used copy of the old one. Probability and statistics professor made the textbook "optional" and provided his own lecture materials -- he said he had to include the textbook because the department made him, but he wasn't going to use it, so he made it optional. Several professors have chosen their textbook based on price: when there were several reasonable options, they picked the one that was cheapest. The only times I can recall having to get a new, expensive textbook was when it was required at the departmental level.
My anecdotal experience is that while university bureaucrats may indeed have reasons for wanting to continue the textbook extortion, professors are usually very sympathetic to students. Less money in students pockets = more stress (more hours working, deciding what sacrifices to make) = harder time with academics.
I attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, btw. Very large public university.
You guys are missing the point! This is all about Windows 8 tablets, which are going to be on the market very soon. The Windows app store is going to be sparse, and honestly, the biggest drawback to getting a Windows tablet. With Bluestacks, you get all the Metro apps AND all your android apps. This is a HUGE deal.
Think about when Intel comes out with the next generation of ultra low power x86 processors: Windows 8 tablets running on x86. You get everything you could want: Real desktop apps, Metro Apps, and all the Android smartphone/tablet apps. Throw it in a case with a bluetooth keyboard + trackpack (or mouse), and why would anyone need or want a laptop? I think it could probably replace the desktop for many users.
I'm telling you, this is HUGE. It will allows Windows 8 tablets to overcome their barrier to entering the market: a mature app store.
We can all make lots of assumptions and see what it looks like on paper. But all that is just supposition, or at best hypothetical, until we can collect some empirical data. It wouldn't be that hard of an experiment to do. But of course, it's easier for the sugar industry to invest in marketing to convince people that corn-based sweeteners are bad than it is for them to experiment. Honestly, I don't think they don't care. They just want to make more money. If putting out bad publicity about HFCS makes the sugar industry more money, then that's what they'll do.
I suspect IBS has something to do with abnormalities with gut flora. It seems strange to me that we are, by quantity of cells, more bacteria than we are human, but I haven't seen a single gastroenterologist observing the health of bacteria colonies in the gut. But that's a random, unrelated topics.
What about me? I drink diet sodas. When I switched to diet, which I now greatly prefer, I didn't start drinking more sodas. Your hypothesis that people drink sodas to fulfill some physiological need for sugar seems, at least by my own anecdotal experiences, incorrect.
I have a brother who drank copious amounts of Mountain Dew, and ten years later, he's got bad Type 2 Diabetes. The quickly metabolized glucose didn't satiate him -- he kept on drinking. Maybe 4 liters a day. Now, I wonder if if drink had been sweetened with 100% fructose, would he have still developed diabetes? Or at least delayed it? It's quite possible. Also, drinking diet soda might have helped, too.
I really don't think he diet was particularly awful. He liked a lot of meat (usually lean and grilled), not too many starchy carbs, not too many sweets. I pretty much blame drinking excessive amounts of Mountain Dew.
I honestly don't believe that people are drinking sodas because their body is signaling them hunger cravings. People drink soda because they're thirsty and want something that tastes good.
I wasn't aware of this, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to have to do some reading on research -- it's new to me. It seems pretty advanced brain science that makes more conventional thinking (such as I mentioned before) inapplicable. Still, as you said, HFCS vs. Sucrose isn't going to be much different, and people who think going back to using cane sugar as a sweetener are still wrong.
Personally, I avoid any sugary drinks -- whether sucrose or fructose. They just seem sticky and syrupy to me. It's really a preference rather than for any benefit. I almost exclusively drink artificially sweetened beverages, which is an whole other can of worms. There may be some dangers, but I don't know that they're any worse than shoving unusually large amounts of sugar (from the an evolutionary perspective) down the hatch.
From all I can tell, HFCS is almost identical to sucrose metabolically. Okay, there is a very, very small amount of extra energy used when metabolizing the sucrose: the bond between the fructose and glucose molecules has to be broken. With HFCS, you have molecules of fructose and molecules of glucose. Interestingly, the ratios of fructose:glucose are almost the same. Sucrose is 50:50 while HFCS is usally 55:45, about the same as honey.
It's also worth pointing out that fructose tastes sweeter than glucose, and is significantly lower on the glycemic index. It also has to be be metabolized into glucose, consume some of the energy provided by it. So really, fructose has advantages: you can use less, because it's sweeter, and therefore have fewer grams of sugars products, and fewer calories for the same level of sweetness. Second, the impact on you body is much less because fructose is metabolized more slowly, especially important for a diabetic. Third, some of the energy contained in the fructose is consumed by the body having to metabolize it into glucose. This is not a negligible difference, and if you think I'm bullshitting you, read the wikipedia article on the Thermic Effect of Food and read this paper specifically comparing fructose and glucose:
You could have all sorts of entities refusing to provides serves unless you consented for them to access your data. Imagine insurance companies requiring access to these boxes in the event of an accident. Don't want to provide it? Then you're not covered. They'll put it in their contract.
Also, I have had a few occasions where a police officer has pulled me over on some charge, "Sir, you were going 71 mph in a 70 mph speed zone," and then wanted to search my car for contraband. Of course, if you allow them to search, they don't give you the ticket. If you tell them no, they hit you hard with as many as they think they can get away with. (Because you really are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.)
So it's not a leap of imagination to see the police asking for your "consent" to read your box. You can not give it to them, of course.
Lots of problems with the "consent" issue because of coercion to give consent, and contractual terms to give consent.
Obviously, it's a government plot to seed the clouds over Africa with chemicals to sterilize the population. It's one of the uses of chemtrails. We don't have the problems over here so much because drink water that's been treated, and most of us either drink bottled water or have a filter on the tap. The chemicals they use are not transdermal, so the little bit that's in our tap water doesn't affect most people from showering, laundry, brushing theeth, etc.
Exactly! I may not understand the problem, but if they have working copies of XP, why not set up a VM for VMWare Player, install it on the clients, then copy the VM over.
Seems like a hell of a lot easier than trying to automate changes to hard drive partitions. (Which is an interesting thing to do, though.)
Actually, that's just the current paradigm. It's certainly not the only paradigm.
Science begets technology which begets economic growth. If scientists wanted to make money, they wouldn't have any problems... they'd just have to start doing things differently. A lot of research is done by grants that end up being public knowledge that is published in peer-reviewed journals and it's all academia. If they wanted to privatize and get out of the academic world, it would probably be bad for society as a whole, but pretty damn good for scientists.
It's basically the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to all men, and that kind of thing. Pretty much our whole economic engine has been created by scientists. They should really be lauded as heroes for all that they do and how little they do it for.
I'd rather have people getting methadone from a clinic rather than dealing with the drug market -- even if they NEVER got over their addiction.
Ideally, an addict could very gradually get off methadone. At least at the clinic, there is an entry point for getting some real, professional help. A dealer has a great disincentive to help a customer get clean.
Sometimes, we have to pick the lesser of two evils, and make the best of it until we come up with a better solution. Maybe one day we'll have solved the chemistry involved, and have a treatment to administer to get a person clean overnight. Until then, I support the clinics.
I have to disagree with you. Very few people choose their religious beliefs. They are born into them and brainwashed as children. That kind of programming is extremely difficult to overcome, especially when there are massive effort being taken to reinforce it. I hate to say this, but your average joe-evangelical is a victim.
Sir, I suggest, then, that you direct great ire toward the pentagon and to the men (and women, unless Santorum is elected) in uniform. You as a taxpayer have bought their guns from a private corporation, for reasons deemed useful by the state.
I just wrote a long post explaining it, and somehow I wasn't logged in, it got posted as AC, and now it's not here anymore. I am very frustrated because I spent about 20 minutes doing calculations.
Here's the gist of what I had put:
The 10-to-1 figure is for energy, not volume.
A barrel of crude is 42 gallons and has 1.7 MWh of energy. Current market price is $105 per barrel. That's 40.5 kWh/gal. Corn oil has 94 kWh/gal. (Calculated from 120 kcal/tbsp.)
That would mean you could make 1.8 gal of corn oil from a barrel of crude, and corn oil should cost $56.66/gal, but you're saying you can get it for $4, I assume in bulk. So what's the problem? Consider how corn oil is produced: You extract the oil from the germ of the kernel. The remainder of the corn is not useful for oil. That's the part your missing. Here's the calculations on that:
According to wikipedia, a bushel of corn yiels 1.55 lbs of corn oil. Corn oil has a density of 77lbs/gal. So in other words you need 50 bushels of corn to make one gallon of corn oil! A bushel is 8 dry gallons. Raw corn has 132 kcal/cup. That means that 50 bushels of corn has 844,800 kcal of energy, or 982.5 kWh.
So there's your answer: it takes 982.5 kWh of corn to make 94 kWh of corn OIL. A factor of 10.5. Pretty close to the 10-to-1 figure. Divide our $56.66 cost by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40/gal. Figure in some government agriculture subsidies and oil subsidies, some market economics between the two goods, sales of corn byproduct (they don't just discard the portions not used for oil) and you have something very close to your supermarket price on vegetable oil. The 10-to-1 number is just an estimate, but it's a pretty darn good one.
Not all knowledge we have comes from the scientific method. Some of it is just our best guess. A lot of history is like that. When we dig up bones or old writings, and try to reconstruct what a society was like back-when, then we are using science, but we are not creating a strictly falsifiable hypothesis. In the event we DO uncover something new that throws a wrench in our conclusions, we'll rework the theory to satisfy the new data. It's occam's razor.
There is a lot of stuff we suspect, but can't actually test. Even atomic structure is just inference. We haven't actually seen it. Then there are things like the uncertainty principle, where you actually CANNOT know both position and momentum! A lot of stuff is just inferences like that. But it's science. It works. It's real. I don't know why god needs a more rigorous proof than that.
For me, a lot of comes down to the fact that technology works. It's not omnipotent, but it does what it is designed to do. (Of course, sometimes a faulty design fails, but that's not common.) If I were to believe there were a god, I'd have to believe that he... doesn't do anything at all. Except maybe keep the natural order of things going as they are. That's not really a "god" as most religions would have it. It's deism at best.
Atheists don't believe there is no god. They know there is no proof for a god, therefore, it is only reasonable to assume he does not exist. It is not a belief. It is a rational conclusion based on observation. This is different from belief.
Atheism is not faith. It's not "faith" in the same way to saying you don't think there's a magic pink unicorn or flying spaghetti monster is not faith. You don't need faith when you have evidence, or are relying on evidence to make a decisions about something.
Atheism is not a religion, not even when you use "quotes". Atheism is relying empirical evidence rather than superstition. Atheism asks "why?" and doesn't accept "because god says" as an answer. It's hard to accept "we don't fully know yet", but it's a much better answer than "god". Once you write down "god" as an answer for something, you stop looking at the problem, or worse, it becomes taboo to look at the problem. That's a very bad place to be, because, god or not, I don't see anyone solving any human problems except for other humans.
Democracy is a mechanism to do whatever a majority of people more or less think is right, within the framework of the constitution. Specifically, congress was given power to regular commerce, which is directly related to rights of ownership of property.
I wouldn't expect the neighbor to be able to graze his cows in my fields and then sell the solely for his own profits. I would expect the a government to protect my fields in some fashion. This isn't a situation too different.
Slashdot Mirror
1920 x 1200 was becoming common for widescreen computer monitors before 1080p television panels became the norm, then monitors went to that just because production was easier. 16:10 makes more sense a monitor, I think. I was using 1600x1200 on a CRT before I upgraded to a LCD, and now with 1920x1080, I have actually LOST over 10% of my vertical space. It's nice for watching movies or maybe gaming, but for reading long pages of text, the extra vertical pixels are really nice. I feel like 16:10 is a nice compromise. I've seen my laptop (16:9) against a friend's macbook (16:10), and the 16:10 looks ways more natural. My screen looks kinda squished.
I'm currently a college student, and many of my professors are sensitive to textbook prices. One in particular, for computer science, refused to make us buy a textbook (because they were a rip off), and instead provided his own materials on his website. For general physics, there were also modules online, and our professor said the textbook was optional, and suggested we buy and older edition if we wanted one, to save money. My differential equations professor provided homework assignments for both the current AND previous edition of the textbook, so that students could save money buying a used copy of the old one. Probability and statistics professor made the textbook "optional" and provided his own lecture materials -- he said he had to include the textbook because the department made him, but he wasn't going to use it, so he made it optional. Several professors have chosen their textbook based on price: when there were several reasonable options, they picked the one that was cheapest. The only times I can recall having to get a new, expensive textbook was when it was required at the departmental level.
My anecdotal experience is that while university bureaucrats may indeed have reasons for wanting to continue the textbook extortion, professors are usually very sympathetic to students. Less money in students pockets = more stress (more hours working, deciding what sacrifices to make) = harder time with academics.
I attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, btw. Very large public university.
You guys are missing the point! This is all about Windows 8 tablets, which are going to be on the market very soon. The Windows app store is going to be sparse, and honestly, the biggest drawback to getting a Windows tablet. With Bluestacks, you get all the Metro apps AND all your android apps. This is a HUGE deal.
Think about when Intel comes out with the next generation of ultra low power x86 processors: Windows 8 tablets running on x86. You get everything you could want: Real desktop apps, Metro Apps, and all the Android smartphone/tablet apps. Throw it in a case with a bluetooth keyboard + trackpack (or mouse), and why would anyone need or want a laptop? I think it could probably replace the desktop for many users.
I'm telling you, this is HUGE. It will allows Windows 8 tablets to overcome their barrier to entering the market: a mature app store.
We can all make lots of assumptions and see what it looks like on paper. But all that is just supposition, or at best hypothetical, until we can collect some empirical data. It wouldn't be that hard of an experiment to do. But of course, it's easier for the sugar industry to invest in marketing to convince people that corn-based sweeteners are bad than it is for them to experiment. Honestly, I don't think they don't care. They just want to make more money. If putting out bad publicity about HFCS makes the sugar industry more money, then that's what they'll do.
I suspect IBS has something to do with abnormalities with gut flora. It seems strange to me that we are, by quantity of cells, more bacteria than we are human, but I haven't seen a single gastroenterologist observing the health of bacteria colonies in the gut. But that's a random, unrelated topics.
What about me? I drink diet sodas. When I switched to diet, which I now greatly prefer, I didn't start drinking more sodas. Your hypothesis that people drink sodas to fulfill some physiological need for sugar seems, at least by my own anecdotal experiences, incorrect.
I have a brother who drank copious amounts of Mountain Dew, and ten years later, he's got bad Type 2 Diabetes. The quickly metabolized glucose didn't satiate him -- he kept on drinking. Maybe 4 liters a day. Now, I wonder if if drink had been sweetened with 100% fructose, would he have still developed diabetes? Or at least delayed it? It's quite possible. Also, drinking diet soda might have helped, too.
I really don't think he diet was particularly awful. He liked a lot of meat (usually lean and grilled), not too many starchy carbs, not too many sweets. I pretty much blame drinking excessive amounts of Mountain Dew.
I honestly don't believe that people are drinking sodas because their body is signaling them hunger cravings. People drink soda because they're thirsty and want something that tastes good.
Maybe, but the general idea is that you can use less of it to achieve the same level of sweetness, thus fewer empty calories.
I wasn't aware of this, thanks for pointing it out. I'm going to have to do some reading on research -- it's new to me. It seems pretty advanced brain science that makes more conventional thinking (such as I mentioned before) inapplicable. Still, as you said, HFCS vs. Sucrose isn't going to be much different, and people who think going back to using cane sugar as a sweetener are still wrong.
Personally, I avoid any sugary drinks -- whether sucrose or fructose. They just seem sticky and syrupy to me. It's really a preference rather than for any benefit. I almost exclusively drink artificially sweetened beverages, which is an whole other can of worms. There may be some dangers, but I don't know that they're any worse than shoving unusually large amounts of sugar (from the an evolutionary perspective) down the hatch.
From all I can tell, HFCS is almost identical to sucrose metabolically. Okay, there is a very, very small amount of extra energy used when metabolizing the sucrose: the bond between the fructose and glucose molecules has to be broken. With HFCS, you have molecules of fructose and molecules of glucose. Interestingly, the ratios of fructose:glucose are almost the same. Sucrose is 50:50 while HFCS is usally 55:45, about the same as honey.
It's also worth pointing out that fructose tastes sweeter than glucose, and is significantly lower on the glycemic index. It also has to be be metabolized into glucose, consume some of the energy provided by it. So really, fructose has advantages: you can use less, because it's sweeter, and therefore have fewer grams of sugars products, and fewer calories for the same level of sweetness. Second, the impact on you body is much less because fructose is metabolized more slowly, especially important for a diabetic. Third, some of the energy contained in the fructose is consumed by the body having to metabolize it into glucose. This is not a negligible difference, and if you think I'm bullshitting you, read the wikipedia article on the Thermic Effect of Food and read this paper specifically comparing fructose and glucose:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermic_effect_of_food
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8213608
In short, we would all probably be a lot better off if all sweeteners were switch to 100% fructose, whether the source is corn or something else.
The problem is section B.
You could have all sorts of entities refusing to provides serves unless you consented for them to access your data. Imagine insurance companies requiring access to these boxes in the event of an accident. Don't want to provide it? Then you're not covered. They'll put it in their contract.
Also, I have had a few occasions where a police officer has pulled me over on some charge, "Sir, you were going 71 mph in a 70 mph speed zone," and then wanted to search my car for contraband. Of course, if you allow them to search, they don't give you the ticket. If you tell them no, they hit you hard with as many as they think they can get away with. (Because you really are guilty until you can prove yourself innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.)
So it's not a leap of imagination to see the police asking for your "consent" to read your box. You can not give it to them, of course.
Lots of problems with the "consent" issue because of coercion to give consent, and contractual terms to give consent.
Hold on, let me put on my tin foil hat.
Okay.
Obviously, it's a government plot to seed the clouds over Africa with chemicals to sterilize the population. It's one of the uses of chemtrails. We don't have the problems over here so much because drink water that's been treated, and most of us either drink bottled water or have a filter on the tap. The chemicals they use are not transdermal, so the little bit that's in our tap water doesn't affect most people from showering, laundry, brushing theeth, etc.
Exactly! I may not understand the problem, but if they have working copies of XP, why not set up a VM for VMWare Player, install it on the clients, then copy the VM over.
Seems like a hell of a lot easier than trying to automate changes to hard drive partitions. (Which is an interesting thing to do, though.)
Actually, that's just the current paradigm. It's certainly not the only paradigm.
Science begets technology which begets economic growth. If scientists wanted to make money, they wouldn't have any problems... they'd just have to start doing things differently. A lot of research is done by grants that end up being public knowledge that is published in peer-reviewed journals and it's all academia. If they wanted to privatize and get out of the academic world, it would probably be bad for society as a whole, but pretty damn good for scientists.
It's basically the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to all men, and that kind of thing. Pretty much our whole economic engine has been created by scientists. They should really be lauded as heroes for all that they do and how little they do it for.
I'd rather have people getting methadone from a clinic rather than dealing with the drug market -- even if they NEVER got over their addiction.
Ideally, an addict could very gradually get off methadone. At least at the clinic, there is an entry point for getting some real, professional help. A dealer has a great disincentive to help a customer get clean.
Sometimes, we have to pick the lesser of two evils, and make the best of it until we come up with a better solution. Maybe one day we'll have solved the chemistry involved, and have a treatment to administer to get a person clean overnight. Until then, I support the clinics.
Interestingly, my home state of Tennessee is dealing with this issue right now:
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20120217/OPINION03/302170054/Methadone-cuts-will-create-problem
I was going to argue that it didn't start out that way, but then I realized that in some ways it did, and that you said "modern" capitalism.
I have to disagree with you. Very few people choose their religious beliefs. They are born into them and brainwashed as children. That kind of programming is extremely difficult to overcome, especially when there are massive effort being taken to reinforce it. I hate to say this, but your average joe-evangelical is a victim.
Sir, I suggest, then, that you direct great ire toward the pentagon and to the men (and women, unless Santorum is elected) in uniform. You as a taxpayer have bought their guns from a private corporation, for reasons deemed useful by the state.
And of course, now I see I've posted this twice. Haha. My bad!
Oh well, my karma is excellent, I don't need to be modded up, I guess. :D1
I just wrote a long post explaining it, and somehow I wasn't logged in, it got posted as AC, and now it's not here anymore. I am very frustrated because I spent about 20 minutes doing calculations.
Here's the gist of what I had put:
The 10-to-1 figure is for energy, not volume.
A barrel of crude is 42 gallons and has 1.7 MWh of energy. Current market price is $105 per barrel. That's 40.5 kWh/gal. Corn oil has 94 kWh/gal. (Calculated from 120 kcal/tbsp.)
That would mean you could make 1.8 gal of corn oil from a barrel of crude, and corn oil should cost $56.66/gal, but you're saying you can get it for $4, I assume in bulk. So what's the problem? Consider how corn oil is produced: You extract the oil from the germ of the kernel. The remainder of the corn is not useful for oil. That's the part your missing. Here's the calculations on that:
According to wikipedia, a bushel of corn yiels 1.55 lbs of corn oil. Corn oil has a density of 77lbs/gal. So in other words you need 50 bushels of corn to make one gallon of corn oil! A bushel is 8 dry gallons. Raw corn has 132 kcal/cup. That means that 50 bushels of corn has 844,800 kcal of energy, or 982.5 kWh.
So there's your answer: it takes 982.5 kWh of corn to make 94 kWh of corn OIL. A factor of 10.5. Pretty close to the 10-to-1 figure. Divide our $56.66 cost by 10.5, and you get a much more reasonable $5.40/gal. Figure in some government agriculture subsidies and oil subsidies, some market economics between the two goods, sales of corn byproduct (they don't just discard the portions not used for oil) and you have something very close to your supermarket price on vegetable oil. The 10-to-1 number is just an estimate, but it's a pretty darn good one.
Adjust your tin foil hat. :)
Not all knowledge we have comes from the scientific method. Some of it is just our best guess. A lot of history is like that. When we dig up bones or old writings, and try to reconstruct what a society was like back-when, then we are using science, but we are not creating a strictly falsifiable hypothesis. In the event we DO uncover something new that throws a wrench in our conclusions, we'll rework the theory to satisfy the new data. It's occam's razor.
There is a lot of stuff we suspect, but can't actually test. Even atomic structure is just inference. We haven't actually seen it. Then there are things like the uncertainty principle, where you actually CANNOT know both position and momentum! A lot of stuff is just inferences like that. But it's science. It works. It's real. I don't know why god needs a more rigorous proof than that.
For me, a lot of comes down to the fact that technology works. It's not omnipotent, but it does what it is designed to do. (Of course, sometimes a faulty design fails, but that's not common.) If I were to believe there were a god, I'd have to believe that he... doesn't do anything at all. Except maybe keep the natural order of things going as they are. That's not really a "god" as most religions would have it. It's deism at best.
Atheists don't believe there is no god. They know there is no proof for a god, therefore, it is only reasonable to assume he does not exist. It is not a belief. It is a rational conclusion based on observation. This is different from belief.
Atheism is not faith. It's not "faith" in the same way to saying you don't think there's a magic pink unicorn or flying spaghetti monster is not faith. You don't need faith when you have evidence, or are relying on evidence to make a decisions about something.
This DOES happen in America, though. Look at religious zealots vs. abortion clinics.
Atheism is not a religion, not even when you use "quotes". Atheism is relying empirical evidence rather than superstition. Atheism asks "why?" and doesn't accept "because god says" as an answer. It's hard to accept "we don't fully know yet", but it's a much better answer than "god". Once you write down "god" as an answer for something, you stop looking at the problem, or worse, it becomes taboo to look at the problem. That's a very bad place to be, because, god or not, I don't see anyone solving any human problems except for other humans.
Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
Democracy is a mechanism to do whatever a majority of people more or less think is right, within the framework of the constitution. Specifically, congress was given power to regular commerce, which is directly related to rights of ownership of property.
I wouldn't expect the neighbor to be able to graze his cows in my fields and then sell the solely for his own profits. I would expect the a government to protect my fields in some fashion. This isn't a situation too different.