@shinyblurry

The most interesting thing is that the Universe sprang into existence from no prior material.

Big bang theory doesn't say the universe sprang forth from nothing, it says the universe rapidly expanded from the singularity. All the matter of today's universe existed, in some form, in the singularity. Any proposals about the state of the universe prior to the Planck epoch are pure speculation. The rest of your argument is all based on this false presupposition so I won't bother refuting it.

How do you respond to the argument that, if we're simply biological machines then all of our thoughts are nothing but chemical reactions which therefore cannot be trusted?

I say that's a wonderful validation for agnosticism. I just explained this to you the other day. We cannot know anything for sure because we only have our flawed senses and limited mental capacity to rely on. That's agnosticism.

Well, how would you explain the uniformity of morality that we see in all cultures, past and present. It would have to be something explained by biology, except there is no biological imperative except selfishness.

Humans were social creatures long before they invented/discovered Yahweh. We lived in tribes. Hunters cooperated to bring home meat for everyone while gatherers collected fruits/vegetables to also share. Children were raised by the tribe as a whole. The tribe had safety in numbers. Members who were found to be stealing or cheating would find others were no longer willing to cooperate with them, possibly they would face exile. Tell me, would you be more likely to survive, especially in the wild, if you worked in harmony with the others or if you had to do everything for yourself? Similar traits are common in many mammals and birds. Warm-blooded creatures are generally too high-maintenance to be entirely self-sufficient. We can't crank out hundreds of offspring every mating season and walk away. We need to cooperate to survive. None of those non-human mammals have heard God's Word, either, and they seem to be doing pretty well.

In regards to whether thoughts can be harmful..well, consider for example the commandment not to covet. It's a thought crime because it leads to breaking all of the other commandments. Coveting leads to envy, envy to desire, desire to larceny, murder, lying, stealing and adultry. It's entirely rational, nipping problems in the bud before they even begins.

Coveting might lead to theft, murder, etc, or it might lead to nothing. Someone on my block drives a nice Audi A6. I see it now and then and think, "Man, I wish I had an A6" and then I go on with my day. I do not envy them, steal from them, assault them, or murder them. The line is drawn at which point I cause another person harm. Wishing I had an A6 doesn't hurt anyone.

Lacking an objective standard for morality, what makes it wrong? Why is it bad to have sex with animals, hurt people, rape people..if it's just your feelings. If that's the case, some people feel that raping people is just great..doesn't that make them morally justified in your world view?

I do not lack an objective standard for morality. Harmfulness is pretty damn objective. It's not my feelings, it's theirs. It's not ok to rape people because people don't like being raped, ergo rape is not morally justified in my world view. Is it justified in some peoples' world view? Yes, unfortunately it is, but they are a very small minority of the total population (though I'd be very happy for them to be even smaller).

Well, remember how we were talking about taxes? If we're going to play the fashionable game and tack dollar values of benefits onto people's salaries to pad the number for demagogic effect, then my effective tax rate is even smaller, more like 8% if you add the value of my health & retirement benefits to my income. You really need to consider doing your taxes yourself, clearly your CPA is doing something wrong.

So here's the thing, you say firefighters have such a sweet deal because of unions. I have an idea, how about instead of taking away unions from firefighters, why not get unions for everyone?

As for why you get flack from liberals for being a selfish fascist when you bitch about taxes, it's because you never give anyone a reason to think you're somehow being treated unfairly. There's one set of Federal tax laws, and most of us can fill out our 1040 or 1040EZ, grumble, and go on with life. You aren't running your business as a charity to help the unemployed, you're trying to make a buck. There's no blankfist tax, or anti-entrepreneurial tax. On the contrary, there are tax subsidies for small business all over the place, to the point where little middle class worker bees like me get fucking tired of hearing about it.

GE somehow paid zero taxes, and got a 3.2 billion dollar check from Uncle Sam. Instead of bitching about the insanity of that, all you want to do is fuck over all public sector employees all across the nation because you think they might be getting a slightly better deal than you.

Surely by now you've seen this:

A CEO, a tea party member, and a union worker are all sitting at a table when a plate with a dozen cookies arrives. Before anyone else can make a move, the CEO reaches out to rake in eleven of the cookies. When the other two look at him in surprise, the CEO locks eyes with the tea party member. “You better watch him,” the executive says with a nod toward the union worker. “He wants a piece of your cookie.”

That's what you're doing.

Oh, and by the way, student loans are subsidized by tax dollars. As was your K-12 education, I suspect. I bet you've also taken advantage of the services of countless thousands or millions of people who had their education paid for or subsidized by tax dollars. I bet the navy taught you some marketable job skills even (beyond the right way to use a glory hole). You were probably born in a hospital that was subsidized by tax dollars, and delivered by a doctor whose education was subsidized by tax dollars, and received vaccinations for childhood illness that were developed by research subsidized or wholly funded by tax dollars. You might even occasionally use this thing called the Internet, which is based on technology developed at DARPA as part of the defense budget.

Look, I have sympathy for anyone who's struggling to make ends meet, and I know running your own business is tough -- that's why I haven't tried it. But it's your philosophy that says people have to own their failures even if it's not really their fault. If you were working for, say, Blockbuster the last 15 years, did an excellent job, but then got laid off because traditional rentals got destroyed by Netflix, that's your fucking problem, and nobody else should have to help you out with your plight. That includes bailouts in the form of tax cuts.

Me, I want a safety net so that if you seriously fall flat on your face, you won't have to worry about having a place to sleep, and food to eat, and will still be able to go see a doctor for the STD you picked up from fucking farm animals. I think all life is precious, and that the markets are a fickle and harsh mistress, while the nanny state should always welcome you into her large, welcoming bosom.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Yes, LA is really fucked up. So is California in general. And so are my apocryphal firefighters and policemen.

The average pay for firefighters you linked me to doesn't account for benefits and pension, does it? That's just base salary. So, if the average pay for firefighters is just under $44k, then that's pretty much their taxable income because I cannot image what possible expenses they'd deduct, because they have zero financial risk being an employee. And I'd imagine his benefits alone would equal around $15k to $20k. And then of course their pension which is available when they retire at 55.

That's a pretty good deal. And they get women fawning over them and the vox populi calling them heros. Then there's the guy in the private sector, who's painted to look selfish and evil. People like me. But we don't have unions to protect us, give us great pensions and benefits, and we actually create jobs. I created two last year myself. That aside, the real problems with LA and CA are the unions. They were one thing when they protected proletariats from the bourgeoisie in Charles Dickens' England, but they're something entirely different today, especially when allowed to collude with government and legislators.

I grew up in a milltown in the South. You can't get more working class than that. I'm almost 40 and I'm still paying off my college loans, so suffice it to say no one helped me out. Being happy? I know what makes me happy. The same things you mentioned: not having to worry about rent, not having to worry about food, etc. But without getting too personal here, I can safely say some of that worries me right now because of what I owe to the taxman. And probably nine to eight years back I was in a really, really bad place, yet the taxman cometh. I tried to cash a honkey check, but apparently those don't exist. I guess being white only goes so far contrary to modern lib rhetoric.

What I find interesting is if someone like me bitches that the tax is too high, which it is, then some of you complain I'm selfish and refusing to pay my fair share. But isn't it you, the statists who believe in stealing my money to give to others, that are actually being selfish by laying the tax burden so heavy on the middle class? Specifically income tax.

>> ^Contagion21:

>> ^criticalthud:
Logic, physics, and probability all say that when you shift the mass of the earth (ice caps melting), seismic activity will increase.
Wow.. stretch much? I'm not sure if that's an Appeal to Authority (to the sciences of Logic, Physics and Probability) or just Begging the Question (that the mass of the earth has shifted).
Given the relative mass of the crust, and even smaller relative mass of the ice upon that crust, I would wager that the ice caps could completely and totally melt and have an almost, if not entirely, imperceptible difference on the mass distribution for the planet as a whole.
You're doing a disservice to the understanding we have for plate tectonics to imply that earthquakes increase due to global warming and that this isn't just the simple, and well understood case of a massive earthquake due to a subduction zone between the Pacific and North American plates.
However, feel free to back up any of the following claims:
1) Seismic activity has increased
2) Melting ice has a meaningful impact on planetary mass distribution
3) The poles are shifting


yep. could be a stretch.
we could also wager that bringing millions of years worth of jurassic carbon deposits to the surface and burning them in a short period of time couldn't possibly effect our environment. Or we could wager that our surface environment is just a tad bit more fragile than we thought.
i'm just looking at trends, especially over the last 30 years.

But let's say we have just a few milimeters of overall rise in sea levels. That's an awful lot of mass. and then that mass must adapt to currents, concentrating that mass in different ways.
are you a geoscientist? I'm interested in your insights.
pole shifting...or wandering. google it. same with seismic activity.

>> ^criticalthud:

Logic, physics, and probability all say that when you shift the mass of the earth (ice caps melting), seismic activity will increase.

Wow.. stretch much? I'm not sure if that's an Appeal to Authority (to the sciences of Logic, Physics and Probability) or just Begging the Question (that the mass of the earth has shifted).

Given the relative mass of the crust, and even smaller relative mass of the ice upon that crust, I would wager that the ice caps could completely and totally melt and have an almost, if not entirely, imperceptible difference on the mass distribution for the planet as a whole.

You're doing a disservice to the understanding we have for plate tectonics to imply that earthquakes increase due to global warming and that this isn't just the simple, and well understood case of a massive earthquake due to a subduction zone between the Pacific and North American plates.


However, feel free to back up any of the following claims:

1) Seismic activity has increased

2) Melting ice has a meaningful impact on planetary mass distribution

3) The poles are shifting

>> ^mxxcon:

>> ^MaxWilder:
1. The towers were designed to withstand impacts by jet planes and to withstand fires. But they didn't account for the fact that a jet impact would strip much of the insulation on the steel girders. So the impact plus the prolonged fire was what did them in.also when the constructions of WTC started in 1960's, the largest plane was something like 727, if not even smaller, and that's what the designed were accounting for. A logical situation for a plane hitting such tall buildings would a plane lost in the fog coming down for landing..
757 is a much larger plane, fueled for cross-continent flight, and smashed into WTC going much faster than it would normally fly at such height.


As I posted above and you seemed to ignore. This is actually not entirely true at all. According to this site:
http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/analysis/design.html

Not only the is size of a Boeing 707 only slightly smaller than a Boeing 767, but it holds only a mere 980 gallons less fuel, and is faster than a 767 by 77MPh.

And:
"The buildings have been investigated and found to be safe in an assumed collision with a large jet airliner (Boeing 707—DC traveling at 600 miles per hour. Analysis indicates that such collision would result in only local damage which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact."

>> ^MaxWilder:

1. The towers were designed to withstand impacts by jet planes and to withstand fires. But they didn't account for the fact that a jet impact would strip much of the insulation on the steel girders. So the impact plus the prolonged fire was what did them in.also when the constructions of WTC started in 1960's, the largest plane was something like 727, if not even smaller, and that's what the designed were accounting for. A logical situation for a plane hitting such tall buildings would a plane lost in the fog coming down for landing..
757 is a much larger plane, fueled for cross-continent flight, and smashed into WTC going much faster than it would normally fly at such height.

@NetRunner, you have to understand also, I'm completely in favor of people having living wages and benefits. I think too often businesses take advantage of their workers. So we're in agreement. We're just not in agreement how we arrive there.

Unfortunately with the amount of protectionism currently in place so many industries are forcing entrepreneurs out by making it difficult to compete against those companies already rooted in the industry (strict regulations, licensing, permits, taxes, and so on), and as a result competing is too expensive so the number of workers go up while the number of job creators goes down. Soon we'll all be working for Corporations.

That's what people like me want to stop. We won't change this trajectory by going down the same path we've been going down for the last hundred years. We have to face the facts that politicians are more willing to give attention to those with deep pockets than those with barely two nickels to rub together. The rich will always prevail within a human government, and no amount of legislation will change that. It hasn't in the past, and it won't in the future.

Just in case you require examples of protectionism that stifles competition, I have a great many. The recent banking coup is a good place to start. A lot of small and midlevel banks closed after the bailouts (WaMu! Fucking WaMu closed!), so now the big banks no longer have to compete against hundreds of banks. This was by design.

After prohibition the government forced a three tiered system onto the alcohol industry which keeps the two major beer manufacturers on top while the smaller brewers are being edged out. On even smaller levels, a lot of small businesses use government to keep new competitors out by pushing licensing and other expensive requirements onto new businesses. This happens often for hair salons, florists, casket manufacturing, and just about every small business industry in America. NY public transit union recently sought legal injunctions against local businessmen who offer cheap minivan rides throughout the city for much less than what the Metro can offer.

Lastly, look at the film industry. It's a mess. The unions and corporations have made it extremely difficult for independent filmmakers to shoot a film and have it distributed (though the internet is changing things a bit). And the cost of production in Los Angeles is through the roof, because of union fees, permit costs, etc. If you choose to use union actors for a non-union film you could face a pricey lawsuit. And not to mention how difficult it is for those who want to join the unions, with catch 22 rules like, "You must work 200 hours on a union film set to be admitted into the union, but you can't work on a union film shoot unless you're in the union." Funny how people still manage to get in.

The great dispel.

Supernatural claims are quashed as the information flows free over the Internet or whatever replaces it when Telecommunication Companies try to stifle it with data tax.

God is banished into even smaller gaps to hide in.

The tone of politics will erupt and recede back to a less aggressive stance.

America will economically continue to decline while China and the eastern countries rise.

China's continuing social and technological advances will cause weather problems unlike what we've seen so far, if they have to go through the same dirty steps we in the western world did. Eventually, the western world will hopefully help them to skip the worst ecological steps in the energy production.

Entertainment will continue its current trend of getting more and more personalized. The same will happen with news. The two will merge and it will be hard to tell them apart.

The Simpsons will continue all through the decade. Futurama will be cancelled again. South Park will hit dire straits but continue nonetheless. Family Guy will continue. American Dad will be cancelled. Cleveland Show will be cancelled. Joss Whedon will make a new show; it will be cancelled.

3D will fail.

The Optical Discs (cd, dvd, bluray etc) will vanish and Solid State Disks will be common place.

Telephones will become wallets and Cash will be obsolete, only used by people who don't yet embrace the digital credit/debit card.

Facebook will only continue to grow and the 2010 will see people as far more connected. The Internet will reach more people than ever before, and the speeds will increase in general, but not unexpectedly so.

Computers will continue their trend of getting "wider" instead of "higher" - more cores will be added, frequencies will on average reach 4-5 GHz but not much higher. Processor companies will hit the physical ceiling on their processors when they cannot make the process any smaller with silicon. Quantum processors will start to show signs of life and might even start to become marketable.

Global Warming will continue to happen like it does now, it won't be catastrophically bad, but it will be there. Emissions in the west will lower, but the east will offset it. If Africa starts getting in gear it will only get worse.

Polls will show that Obama will not be reelected, but in debates he will flatten the opponent and he will get four more years. Fox will claim foul play and try to foul play the other way. Jon Stewart will cover it and it will be hilarious. Also, netrunner will sift it.

The Sift will change form from what we know now. I hope it will last, but it's hard to say at this point.

More things will happen. Good and bad.

[redacted]

GIRTH is the thing, depth...no more than 8" to 9" or the ladies cervix is gonna be unhappy. Also getting anything above those lengths hard and keeping it that way without the dudes getting woozy is next to impossible. After working in the "Adult Industry" (shooting video, not loads) for the past couple of years I do speak with some real world experience here.

From a personal level, as a guy who has been "blessed" with girth I can say it is a double edged sword (pun intended), you have to be careful not be too aggressive with your action or you will do some splitting. Fun at first yes, but you are more than likely gonna put your lovers vagina on the DL for a few days, and that is NO BUENO! Talking to female talent during porn shoots, when the subject of size, girth and length came up, 98% would say girth over length and prefer avg size cock with good girth, or even smaller cock with normal girth. Length was ALWAYS poo poo'd as being useless past the 9" mark. Spending hours (not kidding) waiting for male talent to get hard cuz they have too much cock...and then the short window of being able to keep it that way makes it rather useless. It's the main reason we never book talent over 9".

my 0.02 worth

ydj

I am a Swiss citizen living in Switzerland, and while I voted against this ridiculous ban, I think I can understand why it passed (after the initial shock of course... I had put more stock in Swiss citizens than this).

All the polls predicted that the ban would be massively rejected and yet it passed; it seems to be an awkward attempt by the people to express their distrust of islam and their fear of its rapid progression in Europe, something that is quite impossible to do in public or in the media without being belittled as a “xenophobe” and “islamophobe” (the latter of which should not be considered insulting). The government, largely left-wing, continually undermine or disregard certain real problems regarding immigration/integration of muslims – most of which come from Turkey and ex-Yugoslavia – in order to retain their politically correct image, even when it is at the expense of the people. One example: the fact that individuals of the above-mentioned population, along with African immigrants, are responsible for over 70% of all criminality in Switzerland, was systematically downplayed and the statistics criticised by the media and the government left, without proposing any constructive solutions. One mustn’t forget that one of the UDC’s main beefs is with immigration, not religion (not that that makes them any better, mind).

@rychan: the ban, like every law project, had to pass the parliament first, where they decide if it is constitutional or not. This is where the UDC, the far right party, sneakily got away with what is in effect a straw-man ban: a mosque is still a mosque without a minaret, and banning them cannot be considered against religious freedom because they can still worship in a minaret-free mosque.

The UDC’s argument was that the minaret, whose purpose is to call for prayer 5 times a day (not allowed in CH), is also a symbol of conquest. Dumb, I know, but it fed into the fears of a country already fed up of being toyed with (Khadafi, the EU, the US and the “secret bancaire”, etc.) and represented by a bunch of pussies who will bow and scrape< /a> to the worst of tyrants just to be liked.

Of course, there is the “religious war” side to it as well, even if all the religious authorities here, christian and other, vehemently rejected the ban, possibly fearing that such legislation could eventually turn on them.

The real test will come when the people vote on an initiative by the “jeunnesse socialiste” which aims at secularising the state. They wish to completely separate church and state, removing catechism, theology and crucifixes from public schools, replacing religious education lessons (which should only be a part of history class) with ethics/civism, cease the funding of “state” churches (protestant or catholic depending on the canton) with tax-payer money, etc.

Somehow, I am not so optimist as to how this will fare... Ignorance is a tough opponent.


@Krupo: your knowledge of CH seems a tad outdated. Not only does CH have one of the smallest and most under-financed armies of western Europe, but it is planning on making it even smaller. As for the sexism, it is the same small group of idiots who proposed the minaret-ban who want traditional christian families with mommy at home and daddy at work, but they're the only ones. An educational reform is working on changing the long lunch break, but most kids eat at school already because, well, mommy's at work too.

As for old-school... how many countries have legalised assisted suicide?

Yes, the average for medical PhD student is $127,272.00

But what doucheface was trying to portray here is that $250k is the average debt, hence using his rhetorical weasel term of "many". But we know that "many" is still only around 10%, of which, an even smaller number of that are actually med students, so fuck this guy.

I really didn't know whether to upvote this. :-)

An to go on a wild tangent...

To the Eugenics debaters:
IMHO the fundamental problem with Eugenics is that human genetic diversity is really small, when compared to other animals, meaning that the complete human genome is rather uniform. This is not good in evolutionary terms. Eugenics plans to make that gene pool even smaller by eradicating "unwanted" strains of DNA.

The problem that follows from this is that we simply do not know which genes might become important for our species survival in the future. Maybe the "gene for alcoholism" might one day protect people from a new kind of disease.

Or to put it in a unscientific but more moving way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxq3A2FHBh8

A gecko foot!

Each toe is covered with tiny micrometer “satae”, which branch off into even smaller “spatulae” thinner than the wavelength of visible light. Spatulae stick to walls by van der Waals forces - the weak electrostatic attractions between adjacent atoms or molecules that arise from fluctuations in the positions of their electrons. If these forces act over a relatively large area, they can build up a significant attractive force.

http://physicsworld.com/blog/2009/08/do_geckos_always_have_sticky_f.html

Substitute A) unintentionally wooden acting for intentionally wooden acting, B) 'Nifty' for "Groovy' and C) Stephen Baldwin for Bruce Campbell, and you have another installment of the Evil Dead series. With an even smaller budget, it appears.