Blanky, let me tell you the rags to riches story of young entrepreneur Terry Gou. He fled communist China to Taiwan, where he used $7500 borrowed from his mom to start a business manufacturing TV dials. In 3 and a half decades, he turned his small business into Foxconn, a billion dollar manufacturing corporation which employs a million workers and produces popular items for Apple, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

Foxconn operates a huge facility called 'the campus', which is a humongous all inclusive structure/city that includes factories, work facilities, living quarters, stores, shops, markets and entertainment. Employees spend almost their entire lives in 'the campus'.

Foxconn is pretty much regulation free, which makes it an ideal environment for workers. Workers on average make $5 to $10 a day and are expected to work multiple 12 hour shifts. They have little recourse for the many injuries and deaths caused by unsafe working conditions and the negative psychological effects of not sleeping. They are not allowed to congregate in groups of more than 2 people on the sidewalk. They have access to one single corporate TV channel, which is produced in house. Motivational slogans are posted all over the campus for encouragement. Anyone who steps out of line or questions authority is met with punishment and intimidation. Employees are also not permitted to leave or enter the campus without a corporate ID badge in good standing.

Foxconn has been in the news recently because its employees have started committing suicide in increasingly larger numbers. Terry Gou has attempted to slow this trend by raising pay from a nickel an hour to a dime.

This is how your free market utopia went wrong.

This is an Orwellian nightmare, but from a purely capitalist perspective, this place is a raging success. It provides millions of jobs and produces high quality, popular consumer products for a very reasonable price; products that you and I both own and cherish.

In a deregulated free market, how does anyone compete with this? What's to keep this from becoming the status quo if it isn't already? This, in a nutshell, is why I fear the Ron Paul Love-o-lution. Foxconn could not happen today in America because of regulations, but with each little bit of accountability that republicans, libertarians and democrats strip away, the closer we get.

Your vision is a beautiful one. The tiny village with a baker, a butcher, a tailor, a shopkeep, a barber and a 5 cent nickelodeon, all working hard and living well together in peace and harmony. It's beautiful. I want to live there too, at least until Terry Gou discovers it and builds a factory there.

Let's talk about "miracles" and "prayer" a second...

You know Lourdes? That place in France where people go on a pilgramige to be healed? Did you know that statistically you have LESS of a chance to be healed "miraculously" if you go to Lourdes than if you don't?

The reality is that people DO go into remission naturally without the aid of prayed or god or faith or anything. The illogical assumption here is that treatment is necessary for someone to get better from something serious. The second illogical assumption is that if someone gets better, it must be because of god.

The reason miracles SEEM "miraculous" is because they are EXTREMELY RARE.

Now you tell me, which is more likely: that a person got better out of a rare case where their body was able to fight off something usually fatal and this hardly ever happens, or that a magical guy in the shy (and again, we have to take into account WHICH magical guy in the sky is "right") used unseen, unknown, and unprovable/unmeasurable forces to cure someone?

And before anyone goes down the path of "prayer helps because of the psychological effects of positive thinking..." GUESS AGAIN. Statistics have shown that positive thinking and such have no effect on getting better. You are just as likely to die if you think positive than if you don't.

http://www.livescience.com/health/080829-happy-thoughts.html

Here's a nice snippit:

"However, when Coyne and other researchers tried to intercede and treat depression among heart attack patients, they found the patient's moods improved, but the rates of second heart attack didn't. Ironically, Coyne said, the most evidence for emotion affecting health actually favors negative emotions, not positive ones. For instance, he said, we know anger and depression are correlated with having a second heart attack, however, what's unproven is whether being positive can reduce the risk."

Stress can make you get ill, but happy happy Jesus isn't going to do shit for you.

The preponderence of the evidence suggests that consciousness is the action of the brain. You only need to study the psychological effects of various physical circumstances, drugs, and brain damages to see so. A corrolary of this is that when the brain decomposes, the last remnant and hope of regaining consciousness is destroyed, unless the data constituting the hardware and software of the brain has been preserved by some other means. Since no such means are yet known, there is probably no afterlife.

Perhaps one of the reasons Islam forbids the use of alcohol is that the knowledge of any mind-altering substance undermines dualism, and dualism is a scaffold for belief in an afterlife.

I would love it if it was just some ordinary non pot smoking person doing it. This guy. Well lets just say his mind is already made up prior to the experience.

Furthermore this won't help anything, you do 30 days and people will come back saying that Marijuana has long term psychological effects that might give rise to psychosis.

It's ridiculous. But 420 all the way.

She takes two puffs and can't assemble a simple cabinet?? These are psychological effects, that can't be the drugs...

She should also learn how to run before doing it on tv.

Let's call a meeting to select a committee to form a group to draft a document to banish this ruthless and inhumane type of behavior!

Goodness knows, this stuff is really important, and downvoting peoples' internet videos has been proven to have lasting psychological effects for years to come!