Sisyphus

Well again, the idea is that you make taking care of yourself easier. Preventative medicine is what I'm talking about. Right now, getting any kind of medical treatment at all, preventative or otherwise, is stupidly complicated and expensive, so most people, rationally or not, don't get help until they have to. And again, the incentive to stay well in any case is staying well. But perhaps Americans are especially prone to causing harm to themselves? How about a taxpayer-funded plan that only covers preventative care? Just throwing ideas out there... Oh, I know. I'm not even talking about what's actually being proposed, which at this point I no longer even understand. A real socialized system and a totally unregulated system seem to be about equally politically infeasible, although they'd both probably be better than both what we have and what we'll end up with.

It is not true that emergency rooms in the U.S. give free health care. They'll treat you before you pay, but they'll certainly make you pay later. Not long ago, my friend cut his foot, went to the ER, waited 3 hours, got 4 stitches, then got a bill for $800. (Yes, he did have insurance, but for some arcane reason it wasn't covered.) It is true that not everyone pays, though - a lot of people just go bankrupt. And I seriously doubt that if you got wheeled unconscious into an ER in Canada, they would refuse to treat you unless they could prove you were a citizen. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged True enough. Violent, reckless fat asses we are. And I think that does probably account for a lot. But still, we're paying far more for comparable quality. This is a joke, right? I'll tell you how. Health problems are primarily their own disincentive, whether you can pay for treatment or not. It isn't eliminating risk. What it does, however, is remove the disincentive for preventative medicine, encouraging people to be more responsible for their own health (and, in turn, saving money, since preventative medicine tends to be much cheaper).

That's not a paradox, it's just a limitation of measurement. In other words, you can't show that something is infinite by measuring it, you can only show that it is larger than the scope of measurement. Similarly, you can't say something is instantaneous, only "at least x fast," where x is fastest you are capable of measuring. Or "at most x large," etc. Science is full of this, and sometimes the measurement capability expands. This happened with the speed of light, for example. Of course, not everything depends purely on measurement. You can still deduce that something must be infinite, though I can't think of any examples outside of mathematics. What numbers are those? No finite number of monkeys will guarantee any particular result in a finite amount of time. And it's possible, just extremely unlikely, that a single monkey could type them all up in one afternoon. And a single, immortal monkey would suffice to guarantee success.

Why not just divide the total volume of water by the Earth's surface area? I get 1,300,000,000km^3/510,072,000km^2= 2.55km Sure, it treats the surface of the earth as flat and not curved, but the depth is so small compared with the radius that the error should be very small. Also, I haven't fully checked your math, but I did notice one error in the setup. You've got average radius of the whole earth, and subtract average depth of oceans. But those are averages over two different areas: the whole earth, and the portion of the earth covered by oceans. You can't just subtract one from the other. Also, the Earth is an approximate oblate spheroid, not an approximate sphere, so treating it like a sphere will result in errors.

Obviously spam bots exist, but if they're not selling anything, then it's almost certainly a real human. A lot of people are stupid, crazy, barely literate, or some combination thereof, and online forums are highly attractive to many of them.

All else aside, what are you basing that on?

This idea is doubleplusungood.

Oh I agree, but that alone doesn't account for a change when standing up from a sitting upright position, because the relative heights of the head and heart don't change. Or is the idea that the increase in pressure to the lower extremities results in a corresponding decrease in the upper?

Does that make all government employees morally corrupt, inasmuch as they are paid salaries and buy things with them? Or am I misunderstanding the situation?

Does overall blood pressure decrease, or is it just in the upper portions of the body? Because from a lying down position, at least, it's probably just a matter of raising the height of the head relative to the heart, and the body needing a couple moments to compensate. I'm not sure about going from sitting upright to standing, but perhaps it's just the acceleration draining blood downwards. That's a physics explanation, anyway. I don't know much about anatomy.

Isn't "flat screen television," like "color television," pretty much redundant at this point? [/changing subject]

I am also opposed, for the same pragmatic reasons as you. It doesn't deter crime and it's wildly expensive. If someone can show me otherwise I'm willing to reconsider. As for questions of punishment and free will and all that, it doesn't really matter. The reason the state punishes is to influence behavior. If it doesn't work, it isn't doing anyone any good, and I don't want to pay for it. You could threaten me not to breathe, but no threat is capable of influencing my behavior, so it would be pointless. You could threaten me not to steal, and that can be incorporated into my motivation if it's credible, so it makes sense to follow through on those threats.

Just to be clear, a tube of marbles won't work either, because marbles (or anything) are not perfectly rigid. A compressive wave has to be transmitted down the line, and that wave can't move faster than light.

That's just building the lifter out of stronger than biological materials, though. It's not "overcoming" the cube square law. If you scaled down that heavy industrial equipment, it would be able to lift more weight relative to its size. Of course, you could always just take 200 pounds worth of rhinoceros beetles...

There should be a distinction made between attraction to a minor (i.e., someone below the legal age of consent), and attraction to a prebuscent. I think only the latter would be a distinct "preference."

Men and women can both be castrated. It just means removal or otherwise disablement of the gonads (testicles or ovaries). The point is not physical restraint but a reduction of the sex drive to zero, so they are literally no longer pedophiles, because they aren't anything "philes." IIRC some pedophiles voluntarily seek this out as treatment, and it does work, even if it is extreme. What counts as a disorder in medicine is subjective and basically comes down to whether it negatively impacts oneself or others. So yeah, to a certain extent it is just based on society's view, but it's not merely arbitrary. The reason homosexuality is considered ok and pedophilia isn't comes down to consent. Children aren't considered capable of informed consent to sex with an adult. The basis of that is a whole other topic, but what it comes down to is that pedophilia is a "philia" with no ethically or legally acceptable outlet, while homosexuality can be satisfied with consenting adults, just like "normal" sexuality. I agree completely, and I don't think anyone is suggesting that. There's some semantic confusion, I think. "Pedophilia" as in being sexually attracted to children is not a crime nor should it be, though it is generally considered a disorder. "Pedophilia" as in "engaging in sex acts with children" is the crime.

Another example of the significance of quantifiable (that is, mathematical) prediction is Aristotelean physics. Aristotle described physical phenomena in qualititative terms. He said, for example, that earth seeks to go downward, explaining why the air is above the ground and not vice versa, and why rocks come back down when you toss them in the air. Sure, this agrees with observation. The air is over the ground. Rocks do fall. Because he never tried to predict the way in which rocks will fall (e.g. plot their course over time), this wasn't really falsifiable, and it wasn't a model. It wasn't until much later, when people like Galileo and Newton began making mathematical predictions, that there was actually something to test, to measure and confirm or deny. Newton's law of universal gravitation is a falsifiable model. "Rocks want to go down" is not a falsifiable model.

I don't know what you mean by "observational." But ignoring that word, then no, that isn't sufficient for anything. The new model has to make all of the same, quantifiable predictions as the old model, in addition to observations the old model failed to make. For example, the Ptolemaic model of the cosmos was very good at making predictions of almost everything observable by looking up at the sky with the naked eye. In fact, you can still use his book to determine exactly where things are in the night sky at any given moment. However, it did have some minor inconsistencies. Copernicus came up with a model that resolved those inconsistencies. However, that's not all he did. He showed, quantifiably, that his model was able to accurately predict all the same events that Ptolemy did, and continue to do so for future events. Copernicus' model was not just "the Earth goes around the Sun." It was specific and predictive.

If a model A makes all of the same correct, specific, quantifiable predictions that model B makes, plus correct, specific, quantifiable predictions that model B fails to make, then it is a better model. Otherwise, it isn't. Whether it "makes sense" to any particular person is completely irrelevant. History is full of scientists who are highly skeptical of new models, yes. This is part of how and why science works. It is not full of scientists who dismiss model A in favor of model B. Scientists become scientists because they want to expand and refine human knowledge, i.e. directly contrary to enforcing dogma.

Yes, some things take time. And this did take time, and now it's past time for it to end. And it is very likely to end very soon. So good.

To me the most telling sentence is this: Talk about vaguely directed fear and anger. (First of all: "Terrorists?" What?) Lynch mob mentality. Phi has it right. Either we say it's possible to pay your debt to society, or isn't. If not, then we need to change the basis of our entire legal system.

I don't think anybody thinks most adults are gay. Not even most conservatives. But most vocal anti-gay activists? That I could believe. And yeah, I also believe there are a lot of people in the military who would like a way out. Is that so crazy? Nobody is saying everybody. Nobody is saying most. And I believe that people join up for all sorts of reasons, not only out of a sense of duty. And I believe recruiters are often deliberately misleading. Is any of that really disputable?

I don't understand. Obviously gays are a minority, and obviously we have an all-volunteer military. What does that have to do with anything?

But it's not an infinite chain of cause and effect being invoked. The argument goes: A: Everything needs a prior cause, including the beginning of the universe. Let's call that cause "God." B: So what caused God to start the universe? A: ::special pleading:: So if you hold to the axiom that everything needs a prior cause, then "god did it" (or any kind of first cause) isn't a valid answer. And if you don't hold to that axiom, then it's unnecessary.

But that's the same thing, as per how "God" is being used. Otherwise it doesn't make any sense as an answer to "what caused the (beginning of the) universe?"