Phi for All

For this we need a for-purpose media that doesn't drain the momentum that builds consensus, that doesn't distract us with entertainment profit agendas when we desperately need to be informed. There's a lot stacked against us, and we need to deconstruct the obstacles that keep us from seeing a better long-range, big picture perspective on how our societies will proceed from here. Is wealth going to determine our value as humans instead of intelligence, compassion, and cooperation?

I wouldn't have thought a single election could have done so much harm to the US a couple of years ago. I think it's possible a single election could do an equal amount of good. And I think the People in a democracy are the key.

... whenever we've allowed those it affects most to determine how sheltered they'll be from it. Perhaps regulations with purpose instead of profit as the priority would be measurably more successful. We can't know if we don't give it a fighting chance. I use the same argument for welfare programs. Don't condemn them until we've tried a system more geared to purpose instead of profit.

Not a great argument, imo. You're begging the question that people in general should be smart and educated enough to withstand the effects of concerted and heavily funded marketing campaigns. You're saying people in general have all the tools at their disposal to pierce the veil of lies and deception and spin tactics employed by these corporate behemoths. By taking offense at an argument aimed at "being conned", you assume it's not really possible to pull the wool over the eyes of anyone over ten years old. Why would the oil industry spend billions on marketing themselves as naturists if it didn't con a LOT of people successfully? How can I show you how incomplete this stance is? Oil's contribution (they sold petroleum products) + Consumer contribution (we bought petroleum products) = 0 (they cancel out) But there's also this: Oil's deception (they used their profits to unfairly squelch competition, produce fake science reports, lobby for favorable taxation that further inhibited alternatives, and deceived people in many of the same ways the tobacco industry deceived people) + Consumer deception (what has the consumer done to rival what Big Oil has done in the area of deception? What is balancing this part of the equation in your mind?) = ? (you seem to say this equation balances as well, but can you show me where?). Regulation. Corporations are chartered to work within the law, and compliance with it is supposed to be built in, so we determine the ways we want private industry to behave through regulations. Citizens abide by laws, and corporations are bound by regulations. We need to stop letting extremist businesspeople decide how they're regulated, just like we know it's a bad thing to let shady citizens determine which laws affect them.

And to be clear, I think there's a LOT of profit involved in for-purpose ventures. What needs to change is our acceptance of for-profit behavior. Of course the corporations are going to lobby to give themselves an unfair advantage IF THE SYSTEM ALLOWS THEM TO. It's like sponsoring a marathon race and then letting a small percentage of the contestants set the course. Of course they'll choose terrain that favors them and hampers opponents. I think it's up to us to set the course, not to favor the runners, but to favor those who benefit from having the race in the first place. Forget making it easier for the runners; they are mighty athletes and do what they do better than anyone. Imagine the innovations we'd have now if Reagan hadn't destroyed Carter's solar dreams, if Big Oil had worked hand in hand with alternative energy producers and government scientists to focus on creating effective, affordable, and sustainable energy grids instead of just profitable ones. The more profitable the industry, the more we have to be careful it's not allowed to unnaturally protect itself from competition. This is an area where I feel like a conservative Republican; the market shouldn't show favoritism, and it's better for all if competition is encouraged.

! Moderator Note ... and the misunderstanding turned left instead of right, plunging off the cliffside onto the rocks below, thus averting any real critical thinking and the agonizing possibility of a second page.

This is the heart of my arguments wrt Big Oil. We could have been smart, and developed alternatives alongside fossil fuels if our purpose (generating affordable energy) had been focused on, but the influence of all that profit unfairly and unnaturally skewed the market and sheltered the oil industry from pressures that would have automatically led to a more diverse energy economy. We've long bitched about being dependent, and this is a huge reason why. We really need to adjust our focus. I truly believe that we need to start approaching more endeavors on a for-purpose basis, rather than a for-profit one. If you fulfill a meaningful and needed purpose first, the profit will come and should be all the sweeter for actually helping more of society.

! Moderator Note You blew it by mentioning a "patient". We don't do diagnosis here. See a doctor who can examine you personally.

There's no profit involved when the revenue collected has to go back into maintaining roads and cleaning up pollution. And the subsidies aren't "given" to Big Oil, they've purchased the legislation through lobbying. You know, the government is a tool. You shouldn't blame the knife because ruthless people use it to kill you. Maybe the knife is in the wrong hands.

! Moderator Note Off-topic post and replies to it split to Trash here. This is a mainstream science section. People who understand it seem more than willing to answer questions from people who don't. No one here is willing to discuss beliefs and guesswork asserted by someone who clearly should be asking questions. It's nothing personal, it's science. Off-topic responses will be similarly split. Stay on topic, which is time and speed, and how speed impacts time.

All the individual rants aside, I'm not sure you can fairly redefine justice until you have a system that defends human rights equitably. Why start with justice when there might be a way to remove the need for many crimes in the first place? If the US took better care of it's citizens through effective social programs, a lot of the justice system becomes unnecessary. You also have to define what a human right is. Personally, I think the accumulated human knowledge taught in schools and universities should be everyone's by right. This honors the efforts of those who came before us to help benefit mankind using the resources for research provided by all of us. If we all have free access to education, it then seems more reasonable to hold all of us accountable to a redefined system of justice. Justice is an illusion when it's so contaminated by profit interests. The whole bail system seems more designed to make money off the most desperate citizens than to dispense justice. Read about the practices of private prisons and you can plainly see it's about keeping as many quiet guests as the state can pay for (at higher expense), for as long as you can get away with it. Worse, they funnel millions into political campaigns (like Marco Rubio's) seeking to increase sentence lengths, implement three strike laws, and other legislation which hasn't proven to deter crime or help the legal system; it simply makes more money.

! Moderator Note Slurs against any group aren't welcome here. It's in the rules you agreed to when you joined. Do it again and you'll be banned, just to be crystal clear.

And this was part of the deception all along. In the US, gas is subsidized by every taxpayer, even those who don't own cars. And our gas was always far cheaper than it was in Europe, and we guzzled where they sipped. The oil companies argue they help keep the prices at the pump down, the average taxpayer is happy to have his fellow citizens share those costs, and the market for oil gets abnormally, hideously skewed in the industry's favor. Pressures that other industries normally feel were removed from oil, and that guaranteed that alternatives wouldn't hold the same attraction they did for Europe. Actually, I think the solar issue needs to be addressed by the public, rather than allowing it to be privately manipulated as a cheaper option to oil. Building a solar and wind infrastructure will be expensive to begin with and will most certainly attract private contractors, but once it's in place, the electricity generated is too cheap to attract private investors. Solar and wind systems have no reclamation costs, and their maintenance is also much less than fossil fuel systems. If we want cheap electricity, I think we need to buy back our utilities and run them publicly moving forward.

! Moderator Note Which is like the OP asking why the sky is blue, but your intention is to discuss why blue isn't a color in the first place. It's off-topic here, start your own thread. And if it involves gods, don't post it in a mainstream science section.

Not "the trots"? That's what I call it, and I've ALWAYS used a posh accent to juxtapose the vulgarity of the subject. "The runs" sounds more American to me. Many years ago, computer spellcheck cured me of a weird tendency to misspell "guard". Somehow my fingers learned to type it as gaurd, and eventually that looked right to me. I remember being embarrassingly adamant about how WRONG spellcheck was.

The British way looks more painfully spelled, which seems unnecessarily embarrassing.

You're accepting normal responsibility and suggesting the oil companies are also, and correctly suggesting that doesn't make the general public the victim in this scenario. My argument, if you look at it twice, suggests abnormal manipulation of the market by the oil companies has resulted in a predatory approach that stifled innovation and stalled attempts to better integrate competing sustainable energy systems with the fossil fuel infrastructures. Apply some dimensional analysis to this equation and I think you'll see the responsibility for our addiction to oil isn't equally deserved. I think market capitalism is a wonderful tool, but when it's not properly (and yes, heavily) regulated, it stifles new ideas in favor of old money. I think we'd be in a far better position right now if we'd supported alternative energies for the last 40 years instead of subsidizing oil.

It's a self-healing system if we don't give in to despair and give up our rights. Robots may replace many humans in jobs that make things/move things, but robot owners need customers with jobs so they can afford to buy the things robots make/move. It seems like we can either fight to keep a place in our own societies, possibly without the help of corporations that want all the benefits of citizenship without all the responsibilities, or we can keep letting them shave away at our livelihoods until they figure out just how little they can get away with doing to get the most profit. Simple alternative? Stop believing the small government lies, and have smart regulations guide a more prosperous future for a lot more citizens.

More focus on what the victim is doing wrong. I blame the oil industry for using their insane profits in part to keep their foot on the throat of competing technology, way past the point where society's best interests should have held priority. Responsible people long ago (Carter administration?) should have been helping to create an infrastructure designed to blend fossil and renewable fuel usage so our dependence on oil didn't become an addiction with only one cartel supplying the drugs.

Strange said it better. Past the event horizon, there are no paths other than the one to the black hole available no matter how fast you go, so the extremely warped gravity essentially puts the black hole in your future.

Strawman in yellow, red herring/false dilemma in red (not sure why wanting to be better assumes full eradication is required). It also shows, once again, that you assume "some risk management" is NOT BEING DONE CURRENTLY (and again, that's just insulting). For some reason you can't understand why focusing on the 90% DOES NOT MEAN we ignore the 10%. Please stop assuming this. The media these days does a horribly fantastic job of making all sides of an issue seem equal (which we know they're NOT), and the seeming controversy keeps more people generating more ad revenue. You've already agreed that our two-prong approach should focus more on ways to fix how men treat women. What should the split be? 90-10? 75-25? Remember, women are already doing the vast majority of the risk management. It's worked very poorly for them, and also lets bad boys be bad boys. Good guys should be focused on stopping bad boys, imo, instead of resenting women for falling prey to them.

With regard to male predatory behavior against women, the differences seem to boil down not to opinion, but rather how much you think this behavior is inevitable. I think it can be vastly improved, that men can be raised to respect women more, especially when society as a whole is more aware and aimed in that direction on multiple fronts. That's why I think women in general already do plenty to keep themselves safe, and while I agree there's always room for improvement, the focus needs to move away from more things women can do and onto where it will do the most good, with what men need to do. But if you think the "pronged" approach should include a healthier focus on what women should be doing, aren't you saying the male behavior isn't going to change, that boys will be boys, watch out girls? Why shouldn't we put, say, 98% of our effort into the change-what-men-do prong, so we only really need to put 2% into fixing women? Who knows, fix the men and maybe the women are fine as is?

Oh, gosh, sorry we've been spending so much time insisting that they should be entirely dismissed. I can certainly see how that would be frustrating for you.

Because in our real scenario, whenever the male-focused "prong" is mentioned because that's where the majority of the goddamn focus should be, you guys keep mentioning how fucking important it ALSO is for the victims to be more aware about more things they can do to avoid being preyed upon. Many pages of this and we still can't help you understand. Maybe it's you; can you tell me what percentage of this movement's efforts and resources should be aimed at arming the victims, leaving the rest to disarm the predators? From the frequency with which your argument gets used, it seems like you want the "protective prongs" to be about equal.

Here's my take on your analogy. Let's take a third world country with the same basic situation as Puerto Rico (which is treated much like a third world country). The US is willing to deal with you, giving you much needed aid, but you have to play ball with them to get their help. You'll get money and expertise, but you have to buy coal, sugar, and heating oil from the US instead of using wind and solar (which your island has in abundance), your own sugar growers (who are about half the price), and other resources that aren't as harmful to your environment (burning petroleum to generate electricity is not sustainable, and produces about 50% more CO2 than natural gas). Are any of these problems avoidable by the small country, if the US insists this is the way it has to be? By the argument you and others have used, this country is simply supposed to steer clear of any dealings with the Big Bad Wolf. You would have us focus on ways the small country could avoid being abused by the US, rather than putting more emphasis on the US and it's policies in dealing with small nations. Sure, we all agree the small country should be careful in its negotiations, and avoid any obvious pitfalls. But when the US insists this small country get on its knees and perform as instructed in order to get some favorable deals, with the implication that they'll be frozen out if they don't, why do you guys keep bringing up the fact that the small nation needs to be more careful? Why isn't there an overfocus on the predator?