Simply by having the same education level does not grant you equal pay (unless you're working in government). You're paid for the supply and demand of your skills. There are by far MANY more men than women in engineering and physical sciences, and those fields pay rather well. There are by far MANY more women than men in veterinary and educational fields, and those fields pay atrociously.

It is indeed unfortunate if any discrimination occurs, and even if women achieve 99% of men, it is still not nice. However, recognize that nobody is particularly certain about these numbers. I see numbers ranging from 87% to 103% in this video, so our certainty is horrible. Inequality is bad, but if you're going to get particularly opinionated about it, crunch the numbers for yourself instead of letting other boneheads skew the numbers for you.

The statistics can be pulled either way by horrible analyses, and trying to compare 'equal jobs' can be hard...particularly when you factor in cost of living differences, seniority, relative success of different companies, etc. The most compelling evidence was the Yale study where identical resumes with different names were awarded different amounts of speculative money. That was the only real telling evidence that, at least among the people in that study, there is a bias towards paying women less for exactly the same job. However, the statistics can be pulled either way in a study like that as well; what is the uncertainty of the pay level for that poll? Is it random chance and statistical noise happened to end up with the woman paid less in that study? If they surveyed an order of magnitude more people, would the average salaries converge to the same value? In most polls and studies like this, the sampling size is usually quite poor, and getting such an exact dollar figure difference with high certainty is nearly impossible. It would be great to see that study to make an assessment of how much uncertainty was present for myself.

I think he did. He said the study shows a 1.5% to 3% difference between the two groups, though i think he should have referred to how significant that is, statistically speaking - i.e. what are the uncertainties, cos if it's ±2% uncertainty then the results are practically meaningless. He also said that the study only took sun-time into account, and spoke about the habits associated with people that avoid sun altogether - difficult to exercise and be active without exposing yourself to sun. He mentioned vitamin D deficiency - which is synthesised by sunlight in humans, and deficiency has an impact on all kinds of health issues. Finally he mentioned that there wasn't a control group - average people who neither hid from the sun nor bathed in it, because that would help them narrow their uncertainties or identify critical problems with the study.

Lord, I’m on a Permanent Holiday I’m goin outside to play.
I ain’t gonna slave away. Not for no corporate Babylon.
I’m never gonna be a pawn in their manipulation games
I’m taking the reigns, breaking the chains, I’m never gonna kneel, no way.
My prophet is heaven sent.
No preacher or president gonna lead I astray

I’m taking Jah highway home.
I’ve got my own path to follow
Don’t know if you’ll overstand , I’ve got my own truth to swallow.
And if I could you know I would throw my guitar on my back,
Pick up the slack and leave here tomorrow. But I know that I’m
A pawn of Babylon, I got to face the facts, embrace the axe
And cut these chains of my sorrow

10,000 years of captivity, we must eventually open up our eyes and see
They’re manipulating we. With so much uncertainty and so many mysteries,
Why are so few questioning the unnatural state of things.
It’s a nightmare, we’re living in a nightmare, everyone’s living so scared
They’re virtually unaware of this fear that rules their lives, occupies, consumes their minds
This fear of bankruptcy, financial impotency. It’s money, money , money.
It’s all this digital currency. It’s all this monopoly money that keeps us from ever being free.
And so it seems we’ll be in this prison for life
Cause If we keep buying then they’ll keep selling the lies
And so it’s up to I & I
I won’t be manipulated, mind-controlled and inundated,
I will seek the revelation, make my life a celebration.
I’m gonna be the change I’m seeking, manifest the words I’m speaking
I refuse to be imprisoned I will make my own decisions

I’ll never go astray no.
I’m leaving the past and forwarding fast cause freedom is here to stay.
We got to take back the knowledge, take back the power
Take back what they have stolen from our hearts
Take back the esoteric knowledge, for too long they’ve been keeping us apart.
We got to take back the knowledge, take back the power,
Humanity don’t let this be our final hour.

Damn you! I was all happy thinking the deer went on his way and all was well. But noooo, you had to chime in and fill me with uncertainty and worry with all your thinking. I'm now just left with anxiety and worry blotting out all nice warm fuzzy feelings i had. Thanks a lot.

Atheism is a spectrum, though. At one end you have people who outright deny the existence of gods and, at the other, perhaps you have people who are completely unaware of the god concept and have never given it a thought. These people are still 'without gods'.

Agnosticism, however, is not much of a spectrum. The agnostic believes that the truth about existence of deities is unknown and/or unknowable. It is not a position of uncertainty; it is a definitive claim about the limits of human knowledge/understanding.

They are not mutually exclusive as they are addressing different questions. You can simultaneously be an atheist or theist as well as a gnostic or agnostic. Fun fact: Most existing Christian churches are officially agnostic; gnosticism is considered blasphemous. Most Gnostic Churches were declared heretical and destroyed centuries ago.

You do recall that those "reports" calling this a CIA induced uprising were written by Assad? Are you aware that the ONLY ones claiming uncertainty who was behind the attack are Assad and the Russians? Assad being the one who actively blocked the UN from investigating the site he claimed would prove his innocence?

You are advocating we do nothing as a dictator uses chemical weapons against his own people. How is it humanly possible to have any more certainty than we already do about what is happening within a war zone? This isn't the first time Assad's family annihilated a people. His father put down a rebellion in his time by taking an entire city and simply turning it into a parking lot and mass grave of the residents. Assad has been deliberately targeting civilians and unarmed protesters from the very beginning. This latest attack isn't some lonely isolated charge, it's the icing on a very horrific cake of war crimes.

None of that is to say anything positive about the rebel forces, disparate and varied as they are. Yes, they include people I would declare our allies in the region who from the start were protesting and advocating for a Syria free of dictatorship and the Assad crime family. Unfortunately, the rebels most effective/powerful fighting forces largely seem to be jihadi fighters back by Saudi money, or even worse, Al Qaida and like minded foreigners coming over from Iraq to take on a hated Shia led military in Assads forces. Al Qaida sees a chance to win hearts and minds among Syria rebels, and we play right into that by doing nothing.

More over, with all that Assad is doing, you need to stop and think before apologizing for him. You need to at least admit that when advocating that we do nothing you are up front and honest with the horrific crimes you are demanding we ignore.

Hard to argue with him. Having said that, not every country is as obsessed with owning property as Britain (and Australia). People rent the same property for decades in Germany, I believe.

From where I sit, property ownership = debt = uncertainty = limited capital gains these days. Breaking the property fetish may not in itself be a bad thing for a generation.

The Patriot Act was intentionally put into place in a time of war and uncertainty. It should have been a much bigger deal at that time. I find it funny that the people who are so afraid that our guns are getting taken away had no outrage over this back when it was passed. So willing to give up their freedoms when a R is in office, cause if you don't you're unAmerican or have something to hide.

It's reminds me of the outrage over the embassy attack in Benghazi. That is such a big deal, but the 12 times embassies were attacked when bush was in office are not?

There was a time when I was excited about the future of gaming. I mean, I'm still excited, but it's taking way longer than it should... When the most exciting game to come out in 10 years is Minecraft (IMHO), that's when I call shit on the entire industry and realize that's just the shitty way that the shitty world works. Things become less awesome the more that everyone gravitates towards said same things. Companies see the money being generated and the only return on interest is to keep doing that thing that people say (more like "think") they like about the game(s).

As a consumer I think: Big business is fucked and always will be. I don't want to be marketed to. I don't want people to anticipate what I desire. When that shit starts happening, I'm done and I no longer desire. Because what I desire most is freedom from the constraints of this awful, mind-numbing, driven-into-the-ground system control. Stop, just stop trying to figure us out and by design minimize our being.

Trends are like two sides of an ascending roof coming to meet in the middle. On one side are publishers and on the other side are developers & consumers. When the two sides meet in the middle, business happens. BUT development and consumers (developers are consumers, thus are driven by the same motivations, albeit with the ability to make change) want to keep ascending to a new spot... AND PUBLISHING WON'T LET THEM GO HIGHER BECAUSE THAT IS WHERE UNCERTAINTY LIES. NOT. PROFIT.

Profit. Profit. Profit. YAY FOR THE FUTURE.

That has to be the most comprehensible explanation/demonstration of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle I've ever seen.

http://imgur.com/a/EmhRt
So, the first part is just me moving around a few things to make more room, because I think the top of the site is wasting lots of space.

I think the Promoted videos loks sort of like ads, but the sift of the week is exactly like an ad to me - look at picture 2 where it has an ad right above it.

I would like to see the whole right side bar only use small things, while the left main page can show big things.

When something is promoted to the front page like bareboards2's post, I would want that above the promoted videos, as it seems to break the flow of reading - and * frontpage should be more powerful than * promote.

There's something off about the promoted videos. They obviously try to squish in the title in small font so it can be shown, but at the same time it feels weird I think. Compare a promoted thumbnail with a regular one:
http://i.imgur.com/GFnBp.jpg
The bottom bar on the regular one actually presses in vital information about comments, which is the centerpoint of the sift, together with the videos themselves. This should not be overlooked - the promote needs something like that.

The "Featured" banner is unnecessary - "show, don't tell". We know it's featured, because the damn thing is right in our faces!

I also can't see who posted the video, which is part of my "1 second evaluation" of whether or not I should give the video a chance. There are people I know have tastes that correspond to mine, so this will often give a video that I've already "passed" a second chance at my precious vote/view.

Here's a quick mock-up of a different, but similar way of doing it:
http://i.imgur.com/Hqets.jpg

As for the mechanical way of having only three at the top at any point, I think it gives the wrong incentives.

They will only rotate out when someone "knocks another one down", so there's inherent trolling in that.

There's uncertainty in what you get for your precious powerpoint, uncertainty ALWAYS lead to inaction - so people are scared off and won't use them at all.

@dag mentioned the guiding principles:

"1. Changes should promote altruistic social behavior and limit self-interest (that's been with us since the beginning)
2. Changes should increase the usefulness of the site"

If you can align both points in the first, that's much better. People are inherently self interested first and altruistic after that. Just "consuming" videos is a self-interested thing as well, so we have to make it as easy for someone to absorb the content as possible. For the posters, we also must give the fitting incentives for providing value to the site, but the two types of visitors and two very different animals (although almost all posters are also viewers).

I feel the promote system limits the usefulness of the site for the posters. I don't really want to promote anything, because it'll just be gone again as soon as anyone else gets the idea of posting. I also have to consider whether or not I want the currently promoted video to stick around a little longer before posting - maybe the promoted videos are something I don't like, so me and my posse of late night sifters keep promoting them away from the promote reel with our videos of Maru, the wonder-cat, jumping into things.

I hope my ramblings and child-like drawings make sense.

Well for someone who thinks it's super risky to go out on a limb and assume that the sun will rise tomorrow, you sure do make a lot of specific assumptions about God on the basis of the fact that they are self evident to you.

Oh, and for the 100th time I do understand your argument and for the 100th time your argument is invalid precisely because it is unreasonably extreme to say that "without absolute knowledge, you don't know anything."

It's far more accurate to say that without absolute knowledge we don't know absolutely everything, but we're working on it and we're not doing too bad, it seems.

I've been admitting that all along and I am quite comfortable with that very inevitable degree of uncertainty. Your condescending reference to my supposed "progress" only indicates that you can't read.

Your assumption that the universe must grant us this absolute knowledge is nothing more than hubris. The universe owes us nothing. It owes us no safety, no certainty and no understanding. We are damn lucky to have what little we have.

And you still didn't answer my damn question.

My justification is simply that it has a good track record. If you are really trying to say that I am unreasonable to assume that all physical laws will remain more or less unchanged for the next five seconds then you demonstrate your own stupidity.

The main problem with your justification is that it is logically fallacious. You're still using circular reasoning. Your evidence that the future will be like the past is the past. Is it correct reasoning to use logical fallacies?

You haven't demonstrated that we need to know anything with absolute certainty. Is there any practical value to it?

Can you show me one instance where knowing that something has been the case in every conceivable instance since the dawn of time is just too vague for you?

Things seem to hum along just fine under the crazy assumption that breathing in and out is the way to go.

Well, the thing is, we live in a world of certainty, not uncertainty. What this means is that you are living a double life of sorts. You are uncertain about everything in theory, but of course you never live that way in practice; you expect everything to continue as it has from the beginning of the Creation. You expect that when you jump up you will come back down again. You expect when you say the words "juniper tree" that the sound waves will carry those words to the other persons ear, and they, using universal rules of logic, will comprehend what you're talking about. You are living according to the ideals of a Christian worldview, but simultaneously denying it with your atheism.

Did you know, for instance, that the idea in science of nature being lawfully ordered is a Christian one? It was supposed by 12 century Christians who believed that the Universe was governed by Gods laws, and that we could suss out these universal laws by investigating secondary causes. Here is some of the history of all of that:

http://bede.org.uk/sciencehistory.htm#introduction

So this world of certainty we live in is based in no small way off of Christian ideals and principles. You could not actually justify any of it unless you invoke an omnipotent God who created and maintains all of these things, and will continue to do so. So, the argument is the impossibility of the contrary, which is not only a denial of the world of certainty that we live in, but also the loss of any basis for rational thought.

Nothing can completely eliminate uncertainty, we can only hope to reduce uncertainty.

Are you absolutely certain about that?

It is a false premise to say that there must be absolute certainty, and it is a false solution to say that God gives it.

The premise is that you have no ground for any knowledge claim, and that without God it is impossible to prove anything. If this is a false premise, make a knowledge claim and tell me your grounds for it outside of God.

Is trusting my senses because my senses tell me I was right to trust my senses circular reasoning? In an extremely technical sense, yes.

Saying your senses prove your senses is circular reasoning in any sense of the term.

And it's definitely true to say that some people are better at sensing reality than others. But that's all we have and as it turns out we can achieve some pretty cool things operating under those assumptions.

Some, for instance, seem to think that the divine maker of the Universe told them that the earth is 7000 years old. Those people are pretty bad at interpreting reality and they typically have a really bad track record of finding things like AIDS medications. But hey, they sure can feel intellectually superior to a 6th grader or they might think that they're being smart on an Internet forum and that they have figured out some massive flaw to our blind trust in the audacious assumption that everything that goes up must come down.

Others, on the other hand, use a super rigorous technique to reduce the odds that their conclusions are at odds with the reality we can sense and they do things like invent MRI machines that have this weird ability to predict the presence of tumors.

I mean, I'm inclined to believe that our understanding of physics is validated by repeated, accurate predictions of tumors and broken bones and their nature, but I don't think I should trust that. My senses could be deceiving me.

And why should those predictions be useful even 5 seconds from now? You're placing your faith in something you can't justify. What is the basis for unchanging, universal, immaterial laws in your worldview? Where do you get those outside of God?

Hey shiny blurry, you need to learn how to read. Particularly if you want to be taken seriously.

Nothing can completely eliminate uncertainty, we can only hope to reduce uncertainty. It is a false premise to say that there must be absolute certainty, and it is a false solution to say that God gives it.

Is trusting my senses because my senses tell me I was right to trust my senses circular reasoning? In an extremely technical sense, yes. And it's definitely true to say that some people are better at sensing reality than others. But that's all we have and as it turns out we can achieve some pretty cool things operating under those assumptions.

Some, for instance, seem to think that the divine maker of the Universe told them that the earth is 7000 years old. Those people are pretty bad at interpreting reality and they typically have a really bad track record of finding things like AIDS medications. But hey, they sure can feel intellectually superior to a 6th grader or they might think that they're being smart on an Internet forum and that they have figured out some massive flaw to our blind trust in the audacious assumption that everything that goes up must come down.

Others, on the other hand, use a super rigorous technique to reduce the odds that their conclusions are at odds with the reality we can sense and they do things like invent MRI machines that have this weird ability to predict the presence of tumors.

I mean, I'm inclined to believe that our understanding of physics is validated by repeated, accurate predictions of tumors and broken bones and their nature, but I don't think I should trust that. My senses could be deceiving me.