The police industry is like the porn industry - because of its nature, it has an attraction to bad people. Police as an abstract is just fine and necessary, the problem is people. People are idiots. People with power are dangerous.

I get angry when the police abuse their mandate, but very very often it's not them that is the problem, it's the people they are dealing with.

I won't argue that Chiro makes your joints feel better, Cracking my knuckles makes my knuckles feel better too... but it doesn't make them better. It doesn't "heal" anything, and that is alternative medicine's "Big Issue" with "Allopathic" medicine. You will ALWAYS, 100% guaranteed, get better care from a Physical Therapist, as they're there to ensure your body gets strong enough to heal itself. They can handle "acute adjustments" as well, but they prefer the holistic solution. The best part is, they have a proper understanding of the body, instead of all of the quackery mumbo-jumbo that Chiropractic Practitioners are taught (note: not all believe it, but they aren't taught anything else).

If you want to boil down how vaccines work into three words, sure, you might pick those three... but if you pick four, you'd get a very different phrase: "learn from dead things". But the main difference between vaccines and homeopathy is that we have an excellent understanding of what and why vaccines work, while homeopathy has never been validated by an impartial study. Sure, the premise started the same, but then doctors and scientists actually put work into verifying and validating how vaccines work. They made up new and interesting phrases to describe what was going on, just like homeopathy and it's "water memory", but unlike homeopaths, they reproduced their findings in labs across the country before they started selling it.

Homeopathy and Proper Medicine are as similar as me and the guy that wins a marathon. We both started the race... Sure, I was distracted after a block because I realized I could take a cab to the nearest restaurant and have a nice dinner and a beer, then I watched some TV, and took a cab back to the finish line and crossed it a couple hours later... But hey, we're both the same thing because we started at the same place, right?

The garbage man? I think you mean sanitation, specifically as it relates to bodily wasted, which has been around for over 5000 years. Of course, there have been many advances over the years, and it was not taken seriously in most of Europe until the industrial revolution. But it's certainly true... this technology that has been developing for 5000 years has had more of an effect on human health in cities than anything Medical Science has done.

Of course, it wasn't until we had a good understanding of biological vectors of diseases (research done by "Natural Philosophers", from which sprung all of modern science) that we understood just how important sanitation is, and started real improvements.


TLDR:

Chiropractic Care: May make you feel better, but at it's very best is the very least of what a PT can do.

Homeopathy: Complete and utter quackery, bearing only the most vague and abstract connection to real science.

When I imagine the conceptual aspect of religious experience it comes forth from the brain as something, anything, along these lines. When you want your brother/sister/mama/papa, intent thought your abstract feeling; unknowing and knowing and now you know. You're there with your brother and we're all from the same mother; zygotes to human hive, tricked into individualism maya don't lie.

If this is true (i believe not..) you should not learn to play when your that angry; your brain is not accepting any new information in that state. I have been that frustrated with instruments, lots of times, it's the escalation of frustration turning in to anger and destruction.. Music is about creation (that's why rockstars smash up their guitars out of joy, even if it's anger towards society or another abstract thing, maybe even their own lives and relationships, the smashing is done with joy.), there can be creation out of destruction but the order is always the same.

Honestly, it's not that all news is bullshit, it's that most (all?) news outlets commit the same fallacious and detrimental information practices as always will happen in any system when experience is posited as "truth".

In the business world we are almost always working to change our perspective on how data flows and how best to store and distribute info; setting our educational bias aside when need be. One particular failed practice that does NOT get enough high level analyzing due to the nature of the bias in which the problem itself creates: Information siloing.

In this case, we have the American people silo'd (and if we don't have them silo'd, we actively seek to silo these "undecided" minds) as either liberal D or conservative R. Once you're silo'd, you now have the ability to be fed limited information, based upon limited experience, as the Truth. This is called a hook. A hook is exactly what you think it means and is not bad of itself, because hooks exist in all systems for better or for worse. Otherwise birds of a feather would not flock together. (They flock together because of hooks in their code and the world aka science around them which helps facilitate that hook.)

Now that the hook is in, we have separate news organizations that cater to the data bias you signed up for. You're a human with a blank slate, so don't you dare argue that your opinion is anything but inconsistent, even after education; because you assume that the patterns of existence taught as theoretical and scientifically posited "truth" scale in a reality based upon butterfly flaps of causation. Just accept it: You are fallible and the defects are inherent at every step of our civilization. (Algorithms of usefulness to engineers are only useful if they lessen the load on the user, otherwise we'd all be typing 1s and 0s; so the logic of simplicity suggests our systems are fucked and holding to them is an anarchy unto itself, where ultimate complexity becomes entropy -- LESSEN THE COMPLEXITY. That should be a rule for all government and economy.)

Liberals claim they cater to all sides and conservatives complain that if it wasn't for Fox, there would be no objectivity in the news. This further complicates the matter, but is itself a red herring because it's an argument that essentially says "YOU MUST GET YOUR NEWS FROM A MAJOR NETWORK." If you actually believe that these media giants are the end all be all to gaining information from the "truest" perspective possible, you are a dummy and you need to WAKE UP.

If you never made a thought pattern along these lines, you also need to wake up but I'm not mad at you. Information that deviates from a human's factory defaults (early family and life experiences in the form of fear induced bias) is difficult to objectively analyze. I fault you not, but your call to awaken is noted and will be remembered at the end of all (if you believe in any sort of karmic ending, Christians included). If you don't believe this, then your inability to rule the boundaries of your mind in the present is damning enough. Fuck you. And fuck your offspring. Subjective fear consume thee as your desperate and once nurturing stride for survival is abstracted into selfish, power seeking nihilism.

Information siloing creates tribal knowledge (which is information held by a select group, and then touted as negative patterns like nationalism and corporate thuggery), and tribal knowledge creates boundaries based upon a skewed perception of what the truth is; which in turn, creates subjective and often intangible competition within a system that should be making strides to improve its process via iteration.

MUD SLING AWAY. Or join me in narrowing the argument to its lowest common denominators and then objectively analyzing the system, starting at a generic starting point and building up to a truer understanding.

Hmm... funny, a couple posts ago, you were arguing against Empiricism... and yet, you can't offer up anything that isn't Empiricist, or suffer from the same logical problems that Empiricism has.

I argued against empiricism being the only route to truth, but I didn't say that you couldn't find any truth through empirical means. You would however have no way to confirm it except through God.

"Truth" isn't a democracy... it doesn't matter how many people do or don't believe in a God. (Though I argue that in this country, the demonization of the non-religious scares people into continuing to go to church, despite their belief... though I say that through self experience, as it's hard to poll about that). The "truth" is that you'll never be able to use Science or Philosophy argue for or against the very abstract idea of whether there is a God or not.

I apologize if you were demonized. I love you and God loves you. It doesn't anger me that you're an atheist; I hope that you come to know who God is, and my heart aches for you, but it's your choice.

There are only two ways you can know truth: Either you are omnipotent or an omnipotent being reveals it to you.

One can, certainly, use logic to determine that the bible is self-contradictory, and biblical scholars (and believers) have determined that not a single book in the bible is the "original"... they've all been modified well after it had already been proclaimed to be the "Word of God". There is utterly no logic as to how a perfect being could have such a shoddy and terrible track record with his followers. It certainly doesn't make sense that he could create wars where his followers kill each other (see any and all European Wars.).

The bible is the most well attested book in ancient history. There is manuscript evidence goes back to the late 1st century, and the manuscripts agree with eachother 99.5 percent of the time. It hasn't been modified.

The bible never claims Christians will be perfect; it really says the opposite. Jesus predicts in Matthew 24 that Christians will fall into a massive apostasy and that there will be many wars, especially in the last days.

The truth is that all science and philosophy points to Christianity being bullshit. And you've already pointed out the holes in the only possible philosophical arguments that could allow you to maintain belief while being truthful to yourself.

Only God can prove Himself to anyone, and faith is a gift from God. What I've pointed out, really, is that atheists have no possible route to the truth.



God works by personal revelation; I couldn't prove He exists to you. You could hopefully see the evidence of His existence working in my life, but it takes His Spirit changing your heart and opening your eyes for you to realize that He is there.

And honestly, if you think that someone praying, and then seeing a piece of Toast with Jesus' image on it, or some mold in their bathroom in HIS image is proof enough to devote your life to that sham... well, you really don't have any sort of a grasp on what philosophy is about.

Philosophy is about a search for the truth, and when I searched for the truth, God revealed Himself to me.

But unlike you, I have truly examined the logic of my situation. I know exactly what would convince me of a super-natural power... it's exactly what would convince me of Aliens or Telepathy. A personal experience that can be independently verified by people I trust, and cannot be explained by hallucinations, slight-of-hand or illusions.

That is ALL it takes. It should be the smallest of things for an omnipotent being... after all, he certainly was never shy with appearances or miracles, according to the bible...

But alas, there remains nothing, no shred of evidence... for Jesus or for Telepathy, or for Aliens.... though I imagine that the Aliens at least have a good reason for not making their presence known.

It's no secret what God can do. If you really wanted to know Him, you would know Him already. The reason people don't come to God is because they don't want to change their life and live for Him. Would you lay down everything in your life to know God? If not, it explains why you don't know Him yet.

Hmm... funny, a couple posts ago, you were arguing against Empiricism... and yet, you can't offer up anything that isn't Empiricist, or suffer from the same logical problems that Empiricism has.

"Truth" isn't a democracy... it doesn't matter how many people do or don't believe in a God. (Though I argue that in this country, the demonization of the non-religious scares people into continuing to go to church, despite their belief... though I say that through self experience, as it's hard to poll about that). The "truth" is that you'll never be able to use Science or Philosophy argue for or against the very abstract idea of whether there is a God or not.

One can, certainly, use logic to determine that the bible is self-contradictory, and biblical scholars (and believers) have determined that not a single book in the bible is the "original"... they've all been modified well after it had already been proclaimed to be the "Word of God". There is utterly no logic as to how a perfect being could have such a shoddy and terrible track record with his followers. It certainly doesn't make sense that he could create wars where his followers kill each other (see any and all European Wars.).

The truth is that all science and philosophy points to Christianity being bullshit. And you've already pointed out the holes in the only possible philosophical arguments that could allow you to maintain belief while being truthful to yourself.


And honestly, if you think that someone praying, and then seeing a piece of Toast with Jesus' image on it, or some mold in their bathroom in HIS image is proof enough to devote your life to that sham... well, you really don't have any sort of a grasp on what philosophy is about.

You have no "proof" but one book written by hundreds of people over hundreds of years, translated into so many different versions... and despite the revisions, it's not possible to get through the first chapter without having MAJOR inconsistencies.

But unlike you, I have truly examined the logic of my situation. I know exactly what would convince me of a super-natural power... it's exactly what would convince me of Aliens or Telepathy. A personal experience that can be independently verified by people I trust, and cannot be explained by hallucinations, slight-of-hand or illusions.

That is ALL it takes. It should be the smallest of things for an omnipotent being... after all, he certainly was never shy with appearances or miracles, according to the bible...

But alas, there remains nothing, no shred of evidence... for Jesus or for Telepathy, or for Aliens.... though I imagine that the Aliens at least have a good reason for not making their presence known.

Get a grip Bob, with the abstract variations of modern homelike scenarios in the "parlance of our times," you simply must enjoy the tenderer moments between brothers

I might get lost in the storm here but this is a bit too evangelical.

I appreciate they're trying to drum up support but when you go from this, to the mundanity of bugs, testing etc, the allure will wear off very quickly for those not actually interested in the field.

The step from those plug and play applications to introduce programming is vastly different in "fun" if you will, than actual programming. While it helps to reduce the dog moving to "moveLeft()" as a conceptualisation, the insides of the moveLeft() are deeply involved.

This may seem like a necessary skill for all people but it really isn't. This is the wrong way of looking at, the right way is for programmers now to better understand the needs of the public and provide software that reflects those needs in an approachable way.

There is divide between programmer logic and human logic and I feel resources are better spent teaching people not how to code but to have a level of understanding in the subject simply to communicate their ideas better to programmers.

That to me seems more productive than a slew of amateur work ducted tape together. What we need is abstract software that lets people do whatever they want, easily, simply and without repetition of 10million people solving the same problem for themselves simply to learn programming.

Time is better spent solving the issue of females entering Computer Science type degrees, it is still ridiculously out of a whack and if you solve that, there's your new work force.

Been writing code since I was 8 when I get a C64 in '86.

Writing code isn't for everyone. It's so abstract from anything else I can think of, even math.

There is a definitely a difference between just writing code, and coming up with the solution to the problem. I sometimes write the really hard problems in pseudo code, then go code it up later. So there are definitely two parts to it.

This is how abstract expressionism was invented.

@Sagemind, Agreed on all counts. Education will receive fewer incorrect submissions, but both will continue to require some managing.

I'm thinking of *Pedagogy as a clearer name for Education. Other names don't capture what the word "Education" does because it includes theories of learning which are abstracted from teachers/teaching/classrooms etc.

I didn't specify above, but I'm pretty clear on line between the types of things I want the Learning channel to include and not: a video where the intent of the creator was clearly or presumably education. For the channels in the description above, that's obvious and easy.

Things that are out: normal *news broadcasts/exposé journalism; crazy/interesting/neat-thing-happened (*wtf,*comedy); people learning the hard way (*EIA,*fail,*fear);

An edge case that I might allow are things like http://videosift.com/video/Why-You-Should-NEVER-Pump-Iron-Alone, where could reasonably guess it was published not for any wow factor (nobody laughs at him on camera or comes off looking victorious), but to educate others about what can happen if you're not careful (and it was clearly sifted with that intent). This is different from http://videosift.com/video/Jumping-into-a-frozen-pool-What-could-go-wrong where the intent is clearly comedy/fail.

@dag, Ba-dum ching.

If you have realistic unit scaling, then a Battlecruiser can easily be worth thousands of marines, and hundreds of tanks. Then an individual marine becomes meaningless, and you're now talking about commanding entire companies or battalions, which can easily become overhwhelming and tedious.

I've always thought of the battles in starcraft as abstract representations, and when you get treated to a CG movie, that's a brief glimpse of what "really" goes on during that battle.

Dunno man, their two vibes follow a similar groove during their respective hey-days... recognizable textures with the ethereal and lyrical abstractions in-step with the evolution of album-groove at the time...Bowie invariably had long-jam-cuts on hi best albums-He also surrounded himself with cutting edge fringe musicians for special tracks similar to the Floyd crew....Eno...Fripp...Belew......
Bowies the ultimate rock/pop/dance god! His new viddy creeps me out.

There are other studies showing a different result:

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=246605

or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Australia for a list

Basically when you look back in time past the gun buy back you see a linear rate drop in murder by firearms that is not affected by the buy back.

In fact, there are more firearms now in Australia than before the gun buy back (and the ownership rate is still increasing) and yet the murder rate by firearms is much lower than it was at the gun buyback point (and it is still decreasing).

Here's some facts and ideas. We have a very good mental health program. We have a world class free medical system. We have a world class welfare system for the unemployed/disabled/old/single parents/etc. We have world class free education to year 12 and then government subsidised university education. We have a 99% literacy rate. We have a high rate of satisfaction with life in this country. Our quality of life in general is one of the best in the world for just about everyone. I'd suggest this has a lot to do with our low murder rate.