@chilaxe

Studies are showing that the healthiest and longest-lived people in the world do some daily manual labor their whole life. There's nothing tedious about accomplishing something with your own sweat and two hands: in fact there's nothing more rewarding.

@rougy, @BansheeX

BansheeX's argument makes sense on principle, but there are recent examples of the dangers of corporatism, and some old examples that we like to forget (sweat shops, factory conditions in the 1800s). The ideal is a capitalist system with strong regulation and oversight from a magically uncorruptable democratic government. Corrupt oversight and regulation is worse than none at all; but responsible oversight is absolutely necessary.

It's interesting that Chicken of the Sea didn't even relocate to a new country with different rules. They simply invested in robotics when manual labor became too expensive. Samoa was very poor before, but it's even poorer now that Chicken of the Sea is gone. They will need aid from the government but it has to be used properly to build their infrastructure and provide better jobs that are stable in the long-term.

>> ^rougy:
Solution? Tax the shit out of Chicken of the Sea and subsidize the people of Samoa.


That doesn't sound like a solution. Hopefully Samoans can find some other market niche to occupy. I don't think permawelfare is a state anyone would want to live in, though I agree they weren't doing great even when they had those canneries.

I don't have any education in economics but I've played RTS computer games. It seems like Samoa needs to tool its industries towards providing for their residents because importing costs so much. Once they're more or less self-sufficient (which you might define as 90-95% living above poverty level), then they can look for industries that they can produce at home and export abroad, and pay for their imports. The canneries might have even hurt them, because they became so reliant on one export to provide the capital for their whole economy, and if that company goes under or pulls out or tuna has a bad year, the whole country suffers. I remember a story like that in Africa where they tried turning a region into a heavy peanut-producer, in order to export them to foreign markets, and the plan totally failed and the farmers were even worse off than before because the peanut market went through a sudden change and prices dropped.

The Morrigan-slapping reminds me of what good role playing games are like--a world where you're free to turn a situation on its head and see what results. Bad role playing games are ones that remove your ability to choose and force characters into your party even after they subtly insult you for a minute straight.

>> ^EDD:
How Leno could go home and polish his 300 Ferraris after that without a debilitating sense of shame is beyond me.


He hasn't used any of his Tonight Show earnings on his cars. He hasn't spent it at all as I understand. It seems likely he'll use it for some charities or humanitarian causes in the future, when he's got free time to make sure it gets used correctly (ala Bill Gates). Kimmel is painting Leno as a self-indulgent maniacal millionaire and I don't think there's proof to back that up.

It's not Leno that wants the old timeslot back; the NBC execs are moving him because his 10pm show was getting complaints from affiliates that there wasn't enough of a lead-in audience for their crappy local news. I think part of the reason is that when there's crappy crime drama before the crappy local news, people watch until the very end to see the conclusion to the crappy plot, and then might continue watching that station when the news comes on. Whereas Leno's show, like most talk shows, gets all the good material out in the first half and the second half is skippable. They tried to take care of that problem before it started by moving Jay's better segments to the end of the show--Headlines, Jaywalking--but that resulted in low ratings overall for the show and so they moved it back to the beginning.

I think the problem here is the local news programs. The whole situation is like a stadium changing their game schedule because the hot dog vendors weren't happy. The local news needs to make a better product and trim the fat on their budget to make it through some lean times. Right now they're addicted to a free ride.

I hadn't heard of this guy before, I came upon this interview done shortly before his death to brain cancer and it has some great quotes:

"Death is the black hole of biology. It's an event horizon, and once you go over that event horizon, no information can be passed back out of the hole."

"The real dilemma for human beings is how to build a compassionate human civilization. The means to do it come into our ken at the same rate as all these tools which betray it. And if we betray our humanness in the pursuit of civilization, then the dialogue has become mad."

Aren't there contacts now that achieve the same effect?

I forgot there were that many stars in a night sky.

Thanks for the data Rasch. In the Gallup poll, I wouldn't go so far as to call the 45% of "not entirely certain" all religious, but neither should they all be considered atheists. The Eurobarometer poll painted a slightly different picture. While you can say that some people believing in "church" were actually atheists, there must have been people saying "not entirely certain" who still attended church services or prayed or held religious or superstitious beliefs.

I think the video is still comparing apples and oranges because an "atheist" is commonly seen as a secularist or a naturalist, while the broader sense of the definition has no such connotation. As I said, if a religious label can include both Richard Dawkins and ancestor worshippers, it's not a very meaningful label.

The Religion in Norway wiki also says "In 2005, a survey conducted by Gallup International in sixty-five countries indicated that Norway was the least religious country in Western Europe, with 29% counting themselves as believing in a church or deity, 26% as being atheists, and 45% not being entirely certain." Still a far cry from being majority atheist.

But would an ancestor-worshipping Vietnamese person identify themselves an atheist? Or a Swede that goes to the Lutheran Church of Sweden, which 72.9% of the country considers themselves a part of (despite only 23% belief in god)? The options in the Eurobarometer poll were:

-You believe there is a God.
-You believe there is some sort of spirit or life force.
-You do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force.

The third option seems to be the atheist one. The second option could technically be atheist, but not in a religious sense. Richard Dawkins and a family that leaves oranges on a plate in front of a picture of deceased relatives as an offering to their spirits can't be part of the same religious classification. When you look at atheism as a type of religion, which this video does, it has a stricter meaning than just "nonbelief in any deity," it means "nonbelief in any deity and nonparticipation in other religious classifications."

This is in the video's intro: "Utilizing the results generated from each of the ten most Islamic, Christian and Atheist nations I have compared them directly as to express the clear correlation between religion and conflict." Yet the majority atheist countries he goes on to list are in fact majority religious (except Czech Republic).

^ I made the point that the percentage of atheists numbers they use are often exaggerated and in Vietnam's case, just false. At the very least, people that participate in regular spiritual rituals should be excluded from the "atheist" classification, right? Or can atheists be religious/spiritual too?

It's really deserving of a lies tag. Here's wiki's tally of the percentage of religious people in the most peaceful countries according to the video:

Sweden: 76% religious (23% belief in god + 53% belief in spirituality)
Vietnam: 85% identify as Buddhist
Denmark: 80% religious (31% belief in god + 49% belief in spirituality)
Norway: 79% religious (32% belief in god + 47% belief in spirituality)
Finland: 82% religious (41% belief in god + 41% belief in spirituality)
Germany: 72% religious (47% belief in god + 25% belief in spirituality)

Czech Republic's estimate of 60% atheist was accurate. The Europe numbers all come from a Eurobarometer poll in 2005.

Norway is #2 on their Peace Index and listed as 72% atheist. A quick wiki search reveals that "According to the most recent Eurobarometer Poll 2005, 32% of Norwegian citizens responded that "they believe there is a god", whereas 47% answered that "they believe there is some sort of spirit or life force" and 17% that "they do not believe there is any sort of spirit, god, or life force"," and "Nominal religion in Norway is mostly Protestant (Evangelical-Lutheran) with 78.9% belonging to the state Evangelical Lutheran Church of Norway."

Regarding Vietnam: "The majority of Vietnamese people classify themselves as non-religious, although they visit religious temples several times every year. Their everyday behaviours and attitudes are dictated by the synthesis of philosophies which can be traced from many religions, especially Mahayana Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism. Those religions have been co-existing in the country for centuries and mixed perfectly with the Vietnamese tradition of worshiping their ancestors and national heroes. That special mix explains why the people there find it hard to say exactly which religion they belong to."

You'll catch that guy next time Bruce. Or maybe the time after that. Or maybe...

Thanks for following up, and happy new year.

Maybe we're looking at different ends of science. Your model makes sense during the initial R&D phases, and generating hypotheses. My model makes sense in the later phases, when deciding what constitutes scientific law and fact. I agree with your point on creationism; to be fair, why wouldn't Christians include all other religions' creation myths, and other philosophies' as well? It's better to leave the unsupported theories for religious studies.

I can't fault people for being religious. We have to use our internal rationale to decide what to think about reality and our existence. Whether people decide there's a god with an elephant head, or if they decide we're in one of an infinite number of parallel universes, or if they think we're just machines and consciousness is an illusion, I can't fault them for their choice. I can show them my rationale for my beliefs, and I can educate them based on what science shows. But my point earlier was that science doesn't show what some people claim, and that scientific "constructionism" (i.e., "only what we can prove exists, exists") is intellectually foolish, has been proven to be folly in the past, and is not accepted by the scientific community.

Science and knowledge may never be able to refute basic theism, and if people want to use that fact to justify their beliefs, they can do that. If theists want schools to teach people the world is flat, or that evolution isn't true, or that condoms spread AIDS, they can't do that, and those efforts should be resisted in full force. Religion and science need that firm dividing line, and if someone thinks they can get on in life without one or the other, there's no problem with that as long as they don't infringe on others' rights to make their own choices.
In reply to this comment by demon_ix:
Alrighy then. I'm sober and moderately coherent, so let's carry on.

We have a very different view of science. Science can't possibly work by ruling out things, because there the universe is infinite, or, as infinite as we are able to measure at this time. The experiment that produces a result never comes alone. It's always there to support a hypothesis, and to prove it, if successful.

There will always be things we can't perceive ourselves, and we will always work towards finding new ways to view the universe. If we would ever discover everything there is to know, the world would be rather dull, in my opinion.

This, however, does not grant anybody a license to invent facts, to make claims with no substantiating evidence and to basically invent a new universe and ask the rest of us to live in it.

Proving something by disproving every other possibility only works when there is a finite number of possible possibilities (I love that phrase, by the way). There is no finite group of Gods. Every person is free to come up with a new God every day. If someone were to ask 1000 Christians to describe their God, and then compile their replies into a profile, I'd be surprised if he wouldn't end up with at least 4-5 separate deities.

My problem with all religions, isn't about the nature of the faith, or of the God itself, but rather with the claim that they know something which they can't possibly know. Teaching Intelligent Design in a school and putting it on the same level as the science of Evolution, simply because a book tells you the world is 6000 years old, is ludicrous to me.

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I think we sort of diverged from the original point, and I don't have an actual argument to make anymore. Have a happy new year