Everything but private businesses, right?



Well, officers of public companies are (or should be) held to account by their board, their shareholders, and the market. Those are the people with interests at stake. The reason why public spending is held to such standards is because every taxpayer (and citizen) has interests at stake.

Conversely, there is not much good reason to hold a private business accountable for spending. If you have a lemonade stand and you want to spend all your profits on candy, then that's really up to you. If you're mad that your boss spends all the company money on candy (or lets the secretary do so), work somewhere else.

To be clear, I don't like how the US handled the bailouts of private enterprises because it blurs these lines. But that's a generally separate issue.

It's actually a little bit frustrating reading that article. A life-sized Enterprise... that would have been nuts.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'star trek' to 'star trek, inner light, enterprise, tos, tng, ds9, voyager, scifi' - edited by burdturgler

>> ^Payback:
There's plenty of non-humanoid creatures in Star Trek. The Old Series right up to Quantum Leap Enterprise. It's human nature to care more about those with human features rather than ones that look like crystal spiders (Tholians) or a rock-eating quiche (Horta).IDK, I have a hard time caring about a poor excuse for an alien race that could be called the Wierdnosians or Protudingeyebrowsians. There are probably natives in south american jungles that look more alien than that. It's a budget issue I guess, it's ok.

With today's fancy and cheap CGI and motion capture stuff, I expect any new Star trek series to have more aliens that look like quiche. The yum-yums!

>> ^renatojj:

I never understood how they could get away with adding some tiny prosthetic make-up = new alien race that is conveniently humanoid and speaks english


There's plenty of non-humanoid creatures in Star Trek. The Old Series right up to Quantum Leap Enterprise. It's human nature to care more about those with human features rather than ones that look like crystal spiders (Tholians) or a rock-eating quiche (Horta).

Language is explained by the Universal Translator. Almost no-one is speaking English, it's just all intantly translated by their comm badges.

The Enterprise made of boobs? I'm sold!

I didnt say everything was right what critics say. Thats science. However, you can start by "debunking those 450+ studies one by one, because that article you linked didnt debunk one of them but instead just tried to personally discredit 3 people who they think are too dangerous to their cause.

How about you start by debunking the thousands of studies supporting anthropogenic climate change? More importantly, what makes you think those 450+ studies are more reliable than the pro-climate change studies? Usually, when I see a debate with a vast majority of scientists on one side and a tiny minority on the other, I believe the majority. This isn't a perfect heuristic, but it's a pretty good one. Do you have any good reason to believe the heuristic fails in this instance? What is it that has convinced you the majority is wrong?

Its very easy to say what you are saying. Just like creationists. You cant debunk it. "God told me so, prove me wrong!".

What? This is the stupidest analogy ever. Saying "Look at all this peer reviewed scientific research" is somehow equivalent to "God told me so"?

And studies that try to explain this partly (Svensmarks), and thus attack the "consensus" of the corrupt, get dismissed like its some atheist in a church trying to explain how resurrection is impossible.

This is only true if atheists in church are usually dismissed using careful peer-reviewed scientific research, along the lines of this or this.

There are enough facts plus satellite data, but as long as people like you prefer to get their money taken from them (thats what this is all about, if you still havent noticed), there is nothing objective science can do about it. You have no idea how many billions the global warming market is already. Not only the "scientists" that get paid for every mention of AGW in their studies and articles by the IPCC, but also normal people who make a living by selling stuff that is supposed to decrease CO2 emissions and levels.

And of course there's no money at all to be made in debunking climate change. Dude, the oil industry pumps millions of dollars into research that criticizes the consensus. After the last IPCC report came out, the American Enterprise Institute (funded by Exxon) offered $10,000 to anyone who published an article criticizing the report. If you think money is skewing incentives on the pro-AGW side, why don't you apply the same standards to the denialist side?

Science is falsifiable, but people like you just are saying the Al Gore bullshit "The debate is over" and are bringing old and already debunked arguments (even not used anymore by IPCC).

Care to point out where ChaosEngine made an old and already debunked argument? And just because science is falsifiable doesn't mean that science can never be settled on an issue. The debate about the chemical composition of the sun is over. That doesn't mean that those claims are not falsifiable.

I didnt even know theres actually a site like this that promotes discrimination of scientists by putting their own bullshit on it and claiming their are wrong and calling them childish names like Christy Crocks. Reminds me of those republican kids that invent stuff like "libtard" or "obamallama". Very objective and scientific. It gets sadder and sadder each day.

I know. Very sad. Let me play you the world's saddest song on the world's tiniest violin. Especially after you called ChaosEngine ignorant and stupid and then complained about how sad rhetoric like "Christy Crocks" is.

That you think climate science is a science that is even known well by humankind and thus can be easily proven, proves alone that you dont have a clue... Oh and btw, we are experiencing a cooling now it and will last until about 2020 to 2040. Lets see what new "scientific facts" will pop up to support your religious opinion until then.

Climate science is not a science that is known well be humankind, but it is apparently known well by coolhund-kind. Please tell us how you came up with this forecast, and why you think it is more reliable than the forecasts of, you know, actual experts.

The IPCC is an organization, that has no need to exist, if there is no AGW.

True, but irrelevant, since there is AGW.

You want to keep your job, or you want to get a better paid job... you just have to get rid of a few minor ideologies and then you have a good life for the rest of your life.

OK, so the thousands of climate scientists who claim to believe in AGW are lying to keep their jobs. Confusingly, a number of global warming skeptics are able to keep their jobs without pretending to believe in AGW. Someone needs to figure out how they managed to beat the corrupt system. Maybe they have compromising pictures of Al Gore?

Oh and btw, I think America is very easy to fool with things like this. Take the biofuel for example. It is nowhere near being actual "biofuel". It actually harms our eco-system. Palm oil, clearing of the rain forest to make space for more plantations, high food prices, waste of water, etc come to mind. Other countries like Germany are more skeptical about things like this and have proven once again, that they are right, even though your country (and many other who benefit from it) are still claiming there is also a "consensus" on this matter. How ironic.

What a pointless digression. America is not the only country in the world where scientists believe in AGW. The national science academy in Germany, your paragon for a skeptical country, has also endorsed the IPCC report. So whether or not Americans are easy to fool is completely irrelevant here. Incidentally, 59% of German people believe that global warming is due to human activity. Only 49% of Americans believe this. So maybe you're right -- Americans are easy to fool. You're just wrong about who's fooling them.

Why is it that some people always think that if someone disagrees with them they must not understand them properly.

I understand the analogy. It is a stupid analogy. Have you even heard the expression "comparing apples to oranges"? Can't you understand why free sex = free speech is as accurate as free enterprise = free speech?

@bcglorf I agree with the military advantage, it makes government presence in space exploration justifiable in my opinion, at least where the military edge is concerned.

@direpickle, I also really like the way @TheFreak explains the difference between profit-seeking and nonprofit-seeking enterprises, but I wonder if his characterization might be a bit short-sighted.

Suppose that, in the interest of advancing human development, I decided to spread atheism by forcibly taking control of the major media outlets, internet and schools using them to spread that ideology. I'd finance this endeavour with taxpayer money of course. Sure, not everyone (or every taxpayer) would agree with my goals, specially those backwards people still hopelessly stuck in their petty religious mindsets, but I see the bigger picture here, a paradigm shift for society that would propel it into the future.

My goals are noble, I seek no immediate profit, not everyone will agree with me, but imagine the long term benefits of getting rid of religion, a a much needed paradigm shift that wouldn't otherwise happen if I didn't force society to use its resources a certain way.

Would that be justifiable?

The Fifth Amendment says nothing about dash cams. I did a word search both with and without the space.

But seriously, standard equipment on a car is not covered by the Fifth Amendment, mostly because private enterprise decides these, things based on attractiveness to the buyer, not by government based on Big-Brother-ness. Auger8 didn't say they should be legally required.
>> ^Payback:

>> ^Auger8:
Imagine the world if dash cams were standard, no reckless driving, no speeding, no DUIs, 3 billion safer more aware drivers.
>> ^VoodooV:
I really want to get a dash cam for myself. Should be standard issue for crying out loud. Everyone drives nice when the cops are around but turn into Mr. Hyde when they're gone. Dash cams for everyone would put a stop to that.


...completely negating the Fifth Ammendment in the US.
Just sayin.

>> ^Warmth-:

I agree, with your example, that would be somewhat unfair, especially since Stan is a small time artist.
But then, this is not the example given in the talk?
Equivalent would be something like Stan's neighbor buying Stan's comics, and thinking that they're great, he'd go to the BakeCo and order a customized cake with ArachnidMan[tm] on top of it. Now, if he just ate it with his son and his birthday guests, I can't see anything wrong with that?
Now if anyone started mass producing and selling those ArachnidMan[tm] cakes for profit, without a share going to Stan, that's when I think it starts to get in to the gray areas of morality..

That's actually pretty much what I was saying. Apologies if I phrased it badly. I realise that wasn't the example given in the talk, I was turning the example around to give an example of where protecting IP is moral.

Essentially what I am saying is that there is a difference between a commercial enterprise exploiting someone else's IP for profit, and a consumer using someone's IP for personal use.

The $5.5-billion Enbridge pipeline project is all about sending Alberta bitumen in huge oil tankers to China. Beijing’s own state enterprises are among the project’s major backers, and Beijing has been buying up Alberta’s oilpatch at such a dizzying pace lately it’s hard to keep up. In the spring of 2010, China’s state-owned Sinopec Corp. took a $4.65-billion piece of Syncrude. Then the China Investment Corporation, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party, took possession of a $1.25-billon share of Penn West Petroleum. Last summer, the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation gobbled up Opti Canada for $2.34 billion. And so on.

Then, last month, Sinopec spent $2.2-billion to take over Daylight Energy Ltd., and last week, Petro-China, with the final push of $1.9 billion, became the owner and manager of the MacKay River oilsands project. This is what Ottawa doesn’t want you noticing.

----

It turns out that two can play this sort of game. B.C.’s environmentalists are now making great sport of it, pointing out that Ottawa’s “ethical oil” branding exercise was begun by Conservative party gadfly Ezra Levant, who was succeeded at the Ethical Oil institute by none other than the otherwise intelligent Alykhan Velshi, who parked himself there between his term with Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and his new job in Stephen Harper’s office. Bonus points: Ethical Oil dial-a-quote Kathryn Marshall is married to Hamish Marshall, Harper’s former strategic planning manager.

While it’s all good fun to play Spot the Freemason, something very serious is going on here. Last summer, John Bruk, the Asia Pacific Foundation’s founding president, warned that Ottawa was ignoring the rapid emergence of Chinese government interests “in sheep’s clothing” taking over Canada’s natural resource industries. Bruk told B.C. Business magazine: “Are we jeopardizing prosperity for our children and grandchildren while putting at risk our economic independence? In my view, this is exactly what is happening.”

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/story_print.html?id=5981230&sponsor

Some more info:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/01/12/watch-when-mitt-romney-came-to-town/

“When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” a film about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s time as CEO of Bain Capital, is without a doubt the most serious attack on the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign.

Produced by a former top Romney strategist, the film focuses on people turned out of their jobs at four of the many companies Bain Capital essentially looted, tapping into the popular discontentment with Wall Street to label Romney a “corporate raider.”

The companies — laundry equipment maker UniMac, electronics maker DDI, toy store chain KayBee Toys and office supplier AmPad — were all purchased by Bain and liquidated, “killing jobs for big financial rewards,” the film explains.

“They could care less about us, the way I see it,” one of the film’s subjects explains. “Who am I? Mitt Romney and them guys, they don’t care about who I am.”

The pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future placed a top-dollar bid on the 27-minute film after pro-Romney PACs essentially destroyed Gingrich’s chances in Iowa with a flood of negative advertising that blanketed the airwaves.

“It’s puzzling to see Speaker Gingrich and his supporters continue their attacks on free enterprise,” the Romney campaign said of the Gingrich PAC’s new film. “This is the type of criticism we’ve come to expect from President Obama and his left-wing allies at Moveon.org. Unlike President Obama and Speaker Gingrich, Mitt Romney spent his career in business and knows what it will take to turn around our nation’s bad economy.”

The film comes at just the right time for Gingrich, too: a poll published Wednesday (PDF) found the former House Speaker trailing the former governor in the crucial South Carolina primary by just two percent.

But whether it will be enough to help President Barack Obama in the general election remains to be seen.

This video was published to YouTube on Jan. 11, 2012.

The blunted point of this video: religion is about faithfully following and constraining curiosity, while science is about aggressively questioning and holding nothing sacred.

Science is also about atheistic materialism. The idea of the supernatural cause is rejected apriori:

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

Religion itself serves no purpose. Going to church, partaking in sacraments, putting on a public face of piety, these are the dead works of men. The heart of Christianity is to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, to know God intimately and experientially. It is not religion but relationship.

A point I would add is that in human societies there may be a time and a place for each, but they will still each question the value of the other.

At the outset, they were friends to one another. The idea of an orderly Universe based on universal laws is a Christian idea, and so is the idea that we can suss out those ideas by investigating secondary causes. Science really got its start in Christian europe. Though they are portrayed as rivals now, it is truly a false dichotomy. I think John Lennox explains this best:



What we should be talking about then is the individual common ground, in your own head, between these two things. You describe a more Unitarian God, responsible for creating/upholding the laws of a changing Universe, and nothing else. I might describe a God with far less impact or far greater impact on human lives here on Earth (...or hundreds of Gods along a God power-spectrum). I might also specify some particular stories about how I know my God to be the true God.

At their essence, I don't think there is any conflict. Religion tells us about who the Creator is while science tries to explain how He did it. The bible isn't a book about science, although it contains some scientific principles. It is a book that describes what God wants from us, why He created us. Science shows us His marvels, it tells us why the stars shine so brightly, it reveals their secret power.

The God I believe in is a personal God who created us for a purpose. His desire is for us to know Him personally and attain to eternal life through His Son Jesus Christ. I believe He is the true God because He transformed my life and being, made me whole by His love, and because I received the direct witness of the Holy Spirit. Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ will receive the witness of the Holy Spirit and then Gods existence will become undeniably true. God Himself provides the evidence if you approach Him in faith.

On the other side is Science, where neither bullshit nor treasured dogma are valued once proven wrong. Your world is composed of atoms, which we've taken pictures of, and we've landed robots on another planet... but where we wonder what the meaning of any of this is, and how long its going to be before we screw it up.

The idea that science is an objective enterprise is a myth. This isn't about the best evidence.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”

Max Planck

If you want to challenge the status quo, you need the support of the status quo. It's a closed system. You're not getting any grants or getting published unless you're towing the line on the conventional wisdom of the day. Check out some of the finds that modern science conveniently ignores..



Evidence starts around 10:00 or so

Also check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Exploding-Myth-Conventional-Wisdom-Scientific/dp/1904275303

>> ^bamdrew: