Phi for All

May arise?! The opportunities happen every day. It's always a temptation when it seems so efficient (I see the spider, capture it, and toss it out of the house), and I know my intentions are good, but we all know how fallible we are alone. Most of our rules don't require us to separate these roles. We've reduced the number of judgement calls significantly over the years. In some instances, we even feel free to participate in threads we've moderated (for instance, if a thread needed to be moved to a different section). In most cases though, we try to keep moderation and participation in discussion separate. In very few instances are mods allowed to call out an infraction and punish it all on their own. We do that if we get a drive-by troll, or if somebody flips out during an off time, but most times when we ban or suspend or even give a warning point there have been 3-4 staff members conferring about it behind the scenes. Honestly, I think some folks get bent out of shape here because they don't understand their own ideas enough to recognize the difference between the membership scientifically refuting it and being told (again) that it simply won't work. The leeway our rules give us helps compensate for that, I think.

Of course the counter to that is that mom & pop were barely making ends meet because minimum wage workers couldn't afford to eat at their place. Raise the wages and more people have the power to participate in their own economy. Yet mom & pop regularly vote down wage increases, hoping for new blood from old turnips. If US healthcare costs were more aligned with the rest of the world, people would have even more disposable income. I've long felt that part of the reason why we won't even vote to give our own children better healthcare, education, and wage opportunities is because SOME folks don't think everyone deserves it. They'll cut off their own noses to keep immigrants and other undesirables from benefiting from public largess.

The idea isn't irrational. The way you torture yourself by focusing on this explanation alone is irrational. The way you phrase it, you're creating a problem in such a way that it can't be resolved. You're an unending skeptic, which is NOT the way to be in science. Either decide one way or the other based on the preponderance of evidence, or simply admit you can't know. You're in a loop of illogic. You've painted yourself into a corner with no escape. You're doing all this to yourself.

Yours is an irrational stance, so I was trying to help in a like manner. I have nothing more constructive to offer you, other than sympathy.

Write a note to yourself that says, "Eternal recurrence is NOT TRUE!", and put it in your pocket. Check your pocket the next day, and if it's still there, you'll know it's not a false statement, because if it was, you would have found that in your pocket the last iteration of the universe. You didn't, so eternal recurrence is not a fact.

The last study I read showed that, in the fast food industry at least, an increase to $15/hr in wages equates to a 4% increase, or an extra forty cents on your $10 combo meal. This would only come out of profit if not passed along to the consumer, so the business owners must have mistakenly convinced themselves that people won't pay it, or there's another reason for them to balk at a higher minimum wage. That industry has done it's best to reduce the training and intellectual requirements of the jobs they produce (remove the numbers from the register keys and replace them with pictures of the food, etc), in order hire more immigrants and young people, and I wonder if that hasn't given the average fast food business owner a jaded perception about what their workers deserve to be paid.

! Moderator Note Moved from Science News.

I can't help if you won't even listen to yourself. One minute you say it might not be true, the next you're convinced it's not. You are NOT behaving like a logical person. If I believed in hell, this is exactly what it would be like, the prisoners torturing themselves in their own minds over imagined sins with no real resolutions. I recommend you spend no more time there.

I would argue this describes fully 95% of the species, and virtually everyone here. It's why I look at these personal preferences as tools to apply to specific situations rather than hats to wear. The right tool for the right job, as opposed to wearing my hammer on my head to declare I'm going to use it for EVERYTHING. This is the power of bias. For years I've avoided direct criticism of the whole group in favor of defining exact behavior I disapprove of, yet you think I regularly use a "wide brush" in generalizing. Very instructional.

You're not an expert in this, so you could be wrong. Nothing like what you describe can be substantiated. It seems like there's no escape, but you're not an expert in this, so you could be wrong. You don't know that for sure, so there is hope, right? It seems like you've destroyed your reason to be depressed. Good reasoning!

I think some of the surreality is caused by trying to stretch that Conservative Republican hat over the heads of the "tourists" you saw as well as these violent radicals. If you think about it, there's little difference between the far right radicals and the far left radicals when both blame the government for their problems, and are willing to break the law and justify hurting people to force their views. I have a long-time friend who supports T----, and identifies as a conservative R---------. I can't talk to him about any of this because his position is, imo, completely manipulated by the right, and totally at odds with his personality. He grew up in a household where his widowed mom took advantage of the social programs she could out of necessity, and also had many ways to pay as little in taxes as she could. He resented the government cheese, got in trouble with the IRS as an adult, and gravitated towards the GOP mostly due to their anti-big-government stance. He's a bit misogynistic, slightly homophobic, but I've never heard him disparage minorities or talk about anybody in a hateful way. He's smoked pot and always chafed at too much authority, definitely not a law-and-order type. He got tired of dealing with his hair one day and decided to shave it off and go bald. In gaming, he's the Leroy Jenkins-type who displays little or no caution, busting and rushing with delight. Yet he identifies with conservative values and leadership, and regularly justifies their actions. When the riot started at the capitol, another friend made the mistake of including him in a text exchange asking if we were seeing what was going on, to which he replied, "Right on!" To be fair, this was before the violence was reported, but so far he's been exactly as contrite about it as T----. I'm still trying to deal with this level of ignorance, and feel there's no good answer as long as these folks can continue to look in the mirror and think the hat they're wearing fits them well. That kind of mindset might sacrifice 40 years of friendship for "the cause" if he thinks I'm helping Biden eat babies. This blow to our democracy sent cracks down deep into our whole society, with trust being the biggest loss next to the loss of lives.

And unfortunately, people who wear their conservatism like a hat are fooled into thinking these are fellow conservatives who support the POTUS and want to uphold the Constitution, instead of radical insurrectionists who want to burn the house down.

! Moderator Note And ANY discussion about it here is OFF-TOPIC, so please stop.

At first glance maybe, but it's clear that consumers simply need to put more dots on their phone to improve the protection. Also a couple on their hands, some on their ears, and perhaps dot a few other bits they'd like to keep from getting burnt or falling off. 🙄 I would pay for an app that tracked people around me who had these dots. Like Harry Potter's Maruader's Map, I could use it to avoid them (or seek them out if I have something to sell).

Symmetry would suggest that if our births are not ours to decide, then our deaths should be treated the same way. Many would claim both of these statements to be common sense, yet they're completely opposed. Just as we have an "age of consent", below which one is assumed to be incapable of deciding to explore the responsibilities involved in sexual intercourse, perhaps we need an "age of resignation", below which one is assumed to be incapable of deciding to end their life. I would suggest somewhere in the 150-200 year range.

Are you sure that better information or reasoning will work? In my experience, this type of behavior signals that her conclusions were reached emotionally rather than reasonably. Confirmation bias almost ensures that a reasoned approach will be met with increasing and eternal skepticism. It could be that only another emotional stance can supplant her current one (the way some anti-vax stances were supplanted by fear of COVID-19). You'll get the responses you're looking for today (it looks like you're at the first day anti-spamming security limit of 5 posts), but I can also point out that much of that "general healthy lifestyle" mentality ignores how a modern society needs to look at population density and immunology. It isn't feasible for everyone on the planet to follow the same lifestyles, and we need the opportunities for advancement a dense culture provides, so overcoming this dangerous ignorance about our immune systems is important. Our intelligence sets us apart from other animals, and sometimes the best use of it is to overcome our animal urges and responses.

We've noticed this phenomenon over the years, and we're very glad you came here for help. You had SOME science knowledge, you read more, and something in the mainstream explanation doesn't make sense to you. What you should have done was study the mainstream science and ask questions until the light bulb came on. What you did instead was use that marvelous brain of yours to make stuff up. When you do that, you're connecting concepts using limited knowledge, only the stuff you know, so of course it MAKES PERFECT SENSE -- but only to you. As I said, very glad you came here. Thinking about the shape of the universe is extremely non-intuitive, and many folks make the mistake of thinking it's expanding INTO something else. Science is NOT interested in the truth, actually, since people tend to make up their own truths. Science is interested in the best current explanations, something we can add to as new information becomes available.

Or at least agreeing to lead them on the march on the Capitol?

! Moderator Note It's clear, after 3 pages, that improving your idea won't help it pass our criteria for a speculative concept. You can't explain it properly so anyone else can understand, and you don't seem to acknowledge the lack of methodology that would make your concept possible. Too much magic, not enough science. Thanks to all (especially Ghideon) who took the time to help. I'm closing this since it doesn't meet the rules requirements for the Speculations section. Please don't bring this subject up again on this site.

! Moderator Note But you're not using logic (which is for maths and philosophy, not physics), you're using "This makes more sense to me because I don't understand the mainstream explanation". You need to support your ideas without using your ideas if you're going to do science. You need to remove your own subjective biases as much as possible. How about you ask some questions about what you're unsure of instead of claiming science is wrong? We have some excellent members willing to help if you just take advantage of their expertise. Perhaps you can start by addressing Markus Hanke's observations regarding electric forces and the spacetime continuum?

You're seriously using my quote as an example of duplicitousness in my stance?! Are you saying these courageous patriots were just challenging the unjust laws that protect our national institutions, by arming themselves and breaking into the Capitol building? That's a pretty slimy way to argue, if you don't mind my pointing it out, MigL.

I get this every once in a while. I imagine the system gets a little gassy sometimes, rather than forgetful.

You're hoping the US Congress will choose to break the Elder Wand? Many won't even discuss term limits.

! Moderator Note Olorin, it's against our rules for you to assume your unevidenced, non-mainstream aether concept is a valid argument in the mainstream sections. Either open up a thread defending your idea in Speculations, or stop posting about it. You can't use these ideas in discussion until they're supported.

! Moderator Note A couple of off-topic posts were split to Trash here. Please don't mix religious outlooks in with science discussions, and it's NEVER all right to bring up paranoid conspiracy here.