Phi for All

My philosophy is that you were able to earn that money because of the way this society is set up (or at least that's what societies should be doing, putting opportunity in the paths of its members). You agreed to follow the laws and mores, and do your part. In return, your potential for earning increases significantly compared with complete independence from society. Because you chose society, you can now specialize in something you can trade for, instead of having to hunt and gather all your own food and stuff. You could have gathered your family and bought an island somewhere so you all can live off the land in isolation, never needing roads or parks, or even stores and manufacturers, but you didn't. Taxing your earnings is an incentive to earn more. Taxing your spending means you might avoid spending, and that doesn't help the society's economy. As others have mentioned, sales tax affects a larger portion of a poor person's income than it does a wealthy person's. Why don't you think it's "fair" to tax earnings?

Any hypothesis predicting an intelligence behind the universe needs to show how natural explanations for various unintelligent phenomena fail, or are more complicated than an unseen intelligence. This is just the first one I found in this thread. You make the claim that you've been dismissed out of hand without evidence, when JUST ABOUT EVERYONE has asked you for supportive evidence. If they've dismissed you, it's because you NEVER GAVE US ANYTHING BUT YOUR INSISTENCE. Please think about this. How can we dismiss you without evidence when we were the ones asking for it? My ideas aren't the topic of the thread. You are losing focus. And didn't you read the part about this NOT being censorship? We're disagreeing with you, not stifling your ideas. You need to learn the difference. You have not shown a single scrap of evidence for an intelligence behind the universe. You're not alone, nobody can. Every single phenomena we know about doesn't require an intelligence, so science is pretty adamant that introducing one is superfluous UNLESS YOU'VE GOT SOME COMPELLING EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY. If we defend the scientific method, we do it because it produces the most trustworthy explanations, not because it's ancient, or holy, or seems right, or even because it makes sense. It's as far from a religion as possible. ID attempts to assume there's an intelligence and then explain the universe from there. It's an intellectually devoid assumption that reeks of superstition and fear. Did I mention it's not necessary? The null hypothesis makes much more sense.

To be clear, locking threads because they break the rules we've developed over the last 15 years isn't censorship. Unless someone's being unnecessarily foul, we usually lock threads because of what people aren't saying. In this case, it was because "just look around you" is not the kind of reply we want when we ask for evidence.

It's natural vs supernatural. Science isn't saying "no" to the supernatural, it's saying "Hey, not the right tool for the job." No religious beliefs needed, so science is not morphing into a new religion. What's morping is your definition of both science and religion. One is becoming so broad its meaningless, and the other is purposely narrow to drive your agenda in asking the question. You generalize and assume far too much, and many mistakes you've made have been corrected by others yet ignored by you. Your arguments suffer from this. You'll probably have to leave soon since you can't seem to understand that we don't allow people to make assertions with no support the way you do. It's against our rules, because it's a really, really stupid way to discuss science. You don't get to claim things here without support, and you don't understand what support in science means, so you keep shitting on our forum and screaming when we try to clean it up. You are NOT worth the trouble you cause, and your ideas are baseless until you can support them rationally. What is stopping you from backing up your ideas with more than wavy hands and screaming?

If you keep the asteroid in space and use it there, even the iron is worth a fortune compared to lifting it from Earth.

Ugh, flying cars are a logistical nightmare! Traffic in 3D with city density is a formula for disaster.

Handy andy has been banned for ignoring the rules repeatedly, and for threatening to continue as long as he's here. Officially, SFN officially doesn't deal with intellectual terrorists.

Moving walkways.

! Moderator Note This thread just died and won't be coming back.

Transportation is NOT a one-size-fits-all proposition. I think a broader array of options is needed for flexibility. I also question the whole door-to-door delivery requirement, which seems unreasonable for many otherwise effective modes of travel. I love the idea of high-speed elevated monorail systems that don't interact with automobile roads at all. But even if it was available to me, I'll still be flying to NY next week because it'll only take a few hours, and the plane won't be stopping at every major city on the way. I'll take light rail if I'm going to downtown Denver or the airport, where my car is actually more of a nuisance and an expense. I take my car if I'm going to multiple places in a day (which is most days). I used to ride my bike to the grocers for small runs, but I've gotten better at planning so my groceries no longer fit in my backpack. Unfortunately, most places I need to go close enough for biking require I also have a bigger payload. I can't think of a single system that would be ideal. And many times you can adjust your habits to suit the system. A buddy of mine was horrified to find that taking light rail to work was going to double his commute time compared to driving himself, until his company pointed out they'd pay him for that time if he'd have his coffee and catch up on emails on the ride in every morning. Now he hits the ground running when he gets there. Wasn't it Asimov who had the series of moving walkways across the city, so you could always move to a faster one going in the right direction (like the express lane on some highways)? That might be a good way to move folks from a residential area to a commercial one, where they could choose from faster options depending on their destinations.

We're paying $10,000 annually per person for privatized healthcare in the US. Canada is under $5000, but I just use this as a single-payer system example close to home. What I'd really like to know is why we can't have a MUCH better single-payer system than Canada (which we may spend an extra 25% to get), one that pays the doctor groups like the professionals they are within 30 days (might cost another 20% but it'd be worth it to have their support), and simply start it all off by using Medicare as the framework as Bernie Sanders suggests? It seems to me it would be a great use of public funds to reduce the horrible administrative costs involved when you have so many payers dealing with so many doctor groups. This is the kind of situation taxes are meant for, imo, where huge savings can be had among a huge portion of the population simply because we decide, as a People, to set aside profit as the prime motivation, and focus instead on the health of the nation. Would it be so bad to spend under $8000 per person, have better capitalized doctor groups, and cover many more people with needed healthcare (if Medicare was our national insurer, I personally don't think it would cost this much)? We know by now that a health insurance risk pool is necessary, but it's a horrible scenario to use for-profit models on since nobody can place a value on health the way we can with possessions and even life. Why are we shunning the solutions that help so many, save money for all, increase the level of service, just because it will increase taxes? Why don't smart People prefer paying $8000 in taxes for better healthcare, instead of paying $10,000 through their employer's private insurance?

True. False. False. False. False. Your caricature of me and my goals is only 1/5 accurate. I think this is a problem, and you must be going out of your mind with worry that you're so poor at understanding what others mean by the words they use. Can I suggest you drop the constant sniping at convenient strawmen, and try to understand some nuance beyond the stereotypes you rail against? You might find we share a dislike for the way our taxes are spent, which could go a long way towards fixing the real problems, which incidentally might lower your overall tax burden. It might take some creative solutions (since decades of conservative ones still leave both of us bitching) like investing in fighting the reasons for crime instead of investing in punishing it. It might take going back to the framework for prosperity that worked last time (when the rising tide really did float all boats), back in Eisenhower's day. We seem to agree that leadership is not doing well. I'm sorry you don't see how lopsided the economy is, and how much more it favors the wealthiest extreme capitalists in all things. I think these fat cats have been leaning on the pool table long enough, and I'm calling cheat because that's the only way to stop it. I really hate the image of the US as poorly educated fodder for corporate maneuvering for profit. I don't understand Americans who don't want other Americans to be as well educated as possible, and grateful to a nation that cared enough to invest in their potential. Taxes can fix this, but we have to invest in education, starting with qualified leadership so our public dollars are more effective.

OK, when I remove the partisan rhetoric you constantly want to introduce like a fart at a party, I find this is a sentiment we can deal with rationally. You've always made the assumption that taxes stifle the economy, but always fail to show how, historically. Most of your arguments are for solutions that historically only help the wealthy at the expense of the middle and poor classes. You mention a rising tide helping all boats, and that seems fair to you, because you don't acknowledge how unfair it's been up till now for all the non-yachts. Nobody minds competing fairly, but if you're going to make your sails so big it steals everyone else's wind, or if you're going to make your engines so powerful that it swamps all the smaller craft, then I think the government is the perfect tool for society to remove your stifling influence from the economy. Just like the person in traffic who's causing most of the traffic, you are the problem with our economy. Go ahead and have your extreme sails. Anything above a certain size and you should pay 90% in taxes. Seems pretty clear you were waiting for any chance to say THAT, since it's a really goofy response to swanson't point about what actually grows the economy.

So that's a big NO on answering any of my questions with a meaningful answer. We'll just go with you hovering through life never needing taxes to be used effectively with regard to a national economy of scale, instead of as profit for private ventures.

This is a great argument on common grounds. I don't know anyone personally who wouldn't agree with this. It's a pity the soundness of it gets drowned out by partisan misrepresentations and willful obfuscation. It's the height of hubris to think you earned all the money you've made with no help from anyone else, including the People and the .gov. Did you hover above the roads so you didn't gain their benefits? Did you never go to the library to learn? Did you ever NOT get robbed because the police were on duty? Did your business ever NOT burn down because the People wanted you to have firefighters available? You spent more of your effort-and-ability-earned money in taxes for the military than it would have cost you to learn Russian, but you never seem to mind that. Why can't you accept that your taxes are being misspent, but it's not the concept of taxes that are at fault? Are you so rich that you don't need public roads anymore? Are you so jaded that you don't think roads are a good public investment anymore? Or have you stopped driving, and don't care if the rest of us have to pay tolls to a private company? I don't really think any of these things about you, but your arguments tend this way, making you seem like you don't agree with even the most basic publically funded services. You're so fixated on drawing distinctions that you never draw comparisons. They do exist, and lots of folks have tried pointing them out to you. For one thing, you could drop the stupid fantasy that liberals want everything paid for by taxes. You keep using this argument, and I'm not sure you realize how juvenile and unsophisticated it is. Just sayin'.

One notable exception is petroleum, and its attendant markets. Through a combination of favorable tax structures, subsidization, and massive efforts to squelch competition from alternative technologies, gasoline for automobiles has been on the market far longer than it should have been, imo. Another example of public funding being manipulated to favor private industry's needs over public needs. Imagine if the vinyl record segment of the music industry had the same clout as Big Oil, doing everything they could to sabotage cassette tape and digital technologies. Actually, Big Vinyl might insist we do a better job fixing the roads so the record players in our cars don't skip.

! Moderator Note Can you please give the definition of consciousness you'd like to use for the purposes of this thread? It's been requested multiple times, and the lack of clarity seems to be adding to the endlessness and pointlessness. It doesn't have to be comprehensive as long as it brings everyone to the same page.

For in-line skates, right? If we had an electric motor that small as powerful as a car engine, we wouldn't need car engines.

When we elect people who are rich enough that effective public funding isn't perceived as affecting them (i.e., they don't see the benefits of having prosperous, well-educated employees with access to public services), it's not even a matter of wolves in charge of the henhouse. It's more like trying not to drown while the owners of the boat decide what to charge to fish you out after they tossed you overboard. Our government needs to grow a pair and start demanding that public funds be more effectively used. Taxes aren't collected to benefit the private sector, and the public needs to be reminded of it. I really wish someone would explain socialism to the FOX News crowd, since they're the ones being ripped off both fiscally and intellectually. And lobbying for less taxes has become more profitable for some companies than their best products. General Electric doesn't make any products that give them a ROI as high as their lobbying efforts do.

! Moderator Note Sorry, but our rules state that discussions can't require watching videos or clicking links. Please post your work here for the members to discuss. Thanks!

! Moderator Note You've had 3 pages to support your idea, and you've simply doubled down on your assumptions and soapboxing. We're looking for more than just your words, we need evidence when you claim the things you do in the way you do it. Science has a methodology in place to keep people from wild conjecture, and you're ignoring it. If you can't do more than soapbox, this thread will be closed. Please don't take 3 more pages to comply. And any response to this modnote will be trashed, because the rules aren't up for discussion.

Not sure if you have them in your country, but in the US most big supermarkets will rent you a carpet cleaner and sell you the cleaning solutions for a minimal price. You only need to do a section, right? I would NOT leave it to the landlord to have someone come in to do this. It's an easy fix that doesn't require professionals. I like that you want to do the right thing, but since the landlord doesn't know about this, I see no reason to loop him/her in on it. If he/she sees you cleaning the carpet, you can tell him/her something dripped when you were bringing it home (not a lie). You wanted to be a good tenant, so you took care of it yourself.

I dislike the way your titles differ in intent from your OPs. In the title, you seem to imply that animals know what STDs are, or that there is a correlation between them and sodomy.

The differences between your title and your opening post make it difficult to respond. You seem to be making assumptions in the post that aren't present in the title.

! Moderator Note Moved to Biology from The Lounge.