Phi for All

OK, zbigniew, before you go, why is it you keep pushing these ideas that have no support, with links that only sound like they might? Why do you keep showing up when you're asked to leave? Why do you think your ignorance of science isn't as much of a detriment to your learning as being deaf or blind would be? There's a whole lot that you don't know you don't know about science. How can you be this arrogant and ignorant at the same time?

! Moderator Note Moved from Science News to Anatomy.

Many people go there with ideas they hope will click with someone who has the skills to seriously model them mathematically. What they don't realize is that those folks are already six steps ahead and have seen that it just won't work. It's ironic, in a way, that those folks often reject the input of the very people they came here to see, because their intuition overrides their trust in expertise.

! Moderator Note The OP is no longer with us, mainly for his inability to provide supportive evidence, along with a similar inability to follow the rules. If someone wants to explore facets of this concept and has questions, start a thread in a mainstream section. If someone wants to defend the OP's assertions with supportive evidence, start a thread in Speculations (no more sockpuppets, z). This thread is closed.

You might not be able to break it even if you jumped against it (don't). You'd need to hit it a few times with a big hammer to first score it and then shatter it. Safety glass breaks up into small bits rather than jagged shards, and lamination keeps the bits together. Auto windshields are like that, and even when broken tend to come out as a whole piece. You should definitely have the windows treated to reflect in the summer and let in the light in the winter. I'm surprised a high-rise building wouldn't do that just for the savings in HVAC. You use them when the view demands it. They also make a room look endlessly huge, which is a bonus for city dwellers. The video picture shows that it wasn't tempered safety glass (note the long jagged pieces). No lamination either. Good reason to have it. Apparently they leaned back against the glass and it shattered. Beforehand, they had been play-fighting, and I wonder if one of them didn't score or crack the glass during that mock fight.

Does it help if you picture gravity warping spacetime so drastically that there simply are no paths for anything to escape? There's just a single force, gravity, so there's nothing to cancel out.

Tempered safety glass, possibly even laminated. You can break it if you're really trying, but it's designed for most normal shocks. It can't be too rigid or it causes too much stress on the mountings. You may even see the glass "breathing" (flexing in and out) depending on your building's ventilation system. All perfectly normal. From the height you're at, even wood falling out would be dangerous to those below, but that shouldn't be your concern. It's the creepy part about standing right next to the edge, isn't it? You probably wouldn't get that close to a high drop off without that glass in place, and it seems too fragile to lean against.

! Moderator Note It's obvious that there's no more science to be had in this discussion, and the preaching has taken over. Thread closed.

Human ears don't exist. They're too small and therefore negligible. Or do I detect some goalpost moving? You seem to be purposely setting up conditions for some kind of paradox.

How about games that play themselves for really lazy people?

There's a tight corner at one end of my street, and one of us in the car once observed that we always seem to meet another car coming the other way right at that corner. Once spoken, we started noticing it more often, until it actually seemed weird how often that corner attracted oncoming traffic. It's tight anyway, and sometimes cars are parked along one side, so you need to focus if you meet another car there. It's a pain, and it sticks in your mind for a bit. And every time it happened, we'd remember our observation and seem to pile up more evidence for some bizarre cosmic traffic probability vortex. I knew what was happening, but I let myself be amazed by it for a while. Finally, I started logging it, and sure enough, we just weren't counting all the times the corner was clear. We encountered someone coming the other way about 1 in 8 times, nothing out of the ordinary.

You just disappeared in a puff of logic. You were too small a part of the universe to exist.

Might be a good way to also overturn Citizens United. If you don't want your business up on manslaughter charges, best not to treat corporations as People.

How many have you come up with so far on your own?

I don't know anybody who likes the concept of a private health insurer who profits by spending as little as they can on their clients. Unlike regular insurance, health insurance has no value to negotiate. You can't determine ahead of time when you'll be sick or what it will cost. It's a risk best handled by pooled resources spent to promote health instead of profit, and that means either the public or the state should own it. The .gov could point out that we gave capitalism over 50 years to figure out healthcare and we're a sick joke for such a rich country. Now it's time for the public universal option.

Wicked Witch has been banned as a sockpuppet of zbigniew.modrzejewski.

If Medicare's age limit is removed, and it's offered alongside private insurance, it should gain traction because it's cheaper for both workers and employers. It doesn't have to make a profit for shareholders, so that's between 14-25% savings based on other market margins. As it grows (picking up employees as private health insurers go under), we should realize savings of 7-12% overall just from less administration costs. Having an efficient single-payer system should also have the effect of reducing branding practices among healthcare companies, which also drives up the prices for medical services with name-brand hospitals, name-brand emergency rooms (those are popping up EVERYWHERE near me) and designer drugs. Medicare is very geared towards preventive medicine, which also historically acts to reduce costs. Above all, we have to remember that government sponsored single-payer healthcare insurance will automatically be cheaper because it focuses on health and not profit. If the system can be enhanced so doctor groups get paid faster, it would easily gain AMA approval and support.

OK, multiple insurers force the healthcare system to over-administer, which means 25% of our costs are for administration, compared to 16% in the UK. Source: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/in-the-literature/2014/sep/hospital-administrative-costs Our drug costs are stupid, mostly because we can't negotiate as a country, thanks to Bush II Medicare Part D. Strike that and Medicare can be used as a single-payer system, getting drugs as cheaply as the VA and Medicaid (because they can negotiate). Another thing we should be able to fix is malpractice, which leads to defensive medicine. I don't have a solution for this one, since the doctors continue as private practitioners. This costs us a great deal, and doesn't lead to better care.

I think you should stop treating us as a place where wild speculations are appreciated as discussion material (especially when evidence is never presented). There are other sites for that. The owners of this site prefer more rigor, and most members feel that way too.

Is he going to start laying us off as citizens, in order to cut costs and improve the bottom line?

It was mentioned in the 4th post, and several times thereafter. You continued to claim the placebos themselves were changing, and then redefined them to include a doctor's bedside manner and anything else that seemed to fit your pattern. Six pages worth. I dropped out when I realized you weren't going to listen. Look, you definitely got jumped on in that thread, but you also came in making claims that needed to be clarified, and instead of clarification you doubled down on your claims. Lots of frustration on both sides. I still can hardly believe you're an internet virgin who chose us as his first science discussion site. You don't see buttons, you claim not to know the term "troll" and goddamnit that's just what a troll would say. But it's not impossible, so OK, you're fresh out of the wrapper. I'm sorry if you took any of it personally. We attack ideas here, and we go hardest against the baldest assertions, but nobody should be attacking you personally. The staff tries not to dive in against every snarly word, but nobody should suffer personal insults here.

So your argument is that math is probably the only thing just about everyone could agree on, so we should be using that instead of ridiculous and imprecise verbal guesses? Hmmm, you make a really good point here.

I've often seen the numbers showing how much more Americans pay for healthcare than other major countries. Do we know where that extra money goes? Is that strictly private profit, is it lots of little overages that add up to a lot, is it due to lobbying efforts by mega-corporations? If we want Americans to be alarmed about the state of healthcare, we should point out exactly how they're being cheated. The whole misguided affection for the idea of the country being run like a business instead of a country needs to be slapped out of a lot of people. I prefer non-violent protest, so a virtual slap or something like a bucket of iced water over the head would be good. The purpose of business is profit, and when governments are run that way, the People are ignored. People are an operational expense and thus the least amount possible will be spent on them. We should be pointing out how much money has been wasted opposing our good health as a society. Billions in dollars and so many hundreds of thousands of work hours dedicated to NOT providing what our allies (and even our enemies) from WWII provide to their People. So much effort to avoid doing what a good government should do, and healthcare opponents would tell you it's to save money.

It's hard to get through to you, because you don't seem to read (which is internet forum for "You don't listen"). I still don't know if you understand how much time you wasted in that thread because you didn't understand that placebos are just sugar pills, and they have not changed, but the placebo effect perhaps has. You were the big problem in that thread because you redefined placebo in order to make your misunderstanding work.

Remember that anybody studying empathic ability is going to be looking for behavior that is way beyond what would be considered normal sensitivity to the feelings of others. If they can't document this extraordinary behavior, if it can't be measured repeatedly in a meaningful way, there's no article to write. When they do find evidence, even if it runs against mainstream science, it must be considered and explained. Here's a good example. People have long held that certain charms can affect the outcome of competitive activities (and lots of rational scientists insist luck is an illusion), so psychologists at the U of Cologne devised an experiment that tested this, and found there was an effect outside what would be considered normal. It's not luck really, but it seems that in situations where a lot of confidence can benefit, a lucky charm actually can increase your chances of success in a measurable way. Perhaps you could undertake your own study on empaths with this perspective. Perhaps people who believe they're superempathic are more confident and successful at using the standard share of empathy we all have.