Phi for All

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.

! Moderator Note A string of less than civil and certainly off-topic posts have been split to Trash.

! Moderator Note It seems all the rational parts of this topic have been exhausted. Time for sleep.

Just open Medicare insurance to all, and work hard on improving payouts to private healthcare. It will be cheaper so people will want it, it will pay quicker so doctors will want it, and it will be focused on health instead of wealth so it will be effective as a risk pool for implementing healthcare.

With better (or even bare minimum decent) leadership and representation, the federal government's role as a protector is perhaps more apparent and appreciated. Right now, that role is being actively shunned in favor of its roles as defender and enforcer, and the negative effects are obvious.

The best thing would be to understand what empathy really is. People can be empathic for sure, and here's a test for that devised by the University of Cambridge. Empathy is just the ability to see things from another's perspective, and if you do it right, you can't help but feel a bit the same. But that's a far cry from the kind of supernatural sensitivity you mentioned the empath you know told you he could manifest. When that sort of thing is tested for, it's never repeatable, and any variations from statistical normal are explainable through natural means. Earlier, he might have heard loud voices downstairs, now there's silence, he imagines them brooding angrily, empathizes with it, then goes downstairs and sees his roommates scowling at one another. Let me ask you this, have you ever found what you're looking for, an article reviewing the tests, for something else supernatural, like telekinesis, or telepathy? Have you ever found a study saying "We tested x people and found that nobody could guess which card would come up next in a deck better than a certain range of normal capabilities"?

I get that part. But if there's no further evidence for religion (we're talking about a deity really, a creator) than there is right now, a billion years later, why would people turn that way? And unless you posit that we're able to comb the entire universe in a billion years, there would still be places left to look, which would lend encouragement for one of the last theories left to us, that something unique(?) from an unknown part of the universe interacted with Earth in a one-off event that resulted in life as we know it. Still no need for a creator.

! Moderator Note Last chance. Answer the questions in post #3, or the rules of this section say this gets shut down with no chance of bringing it up in the future. You increased the stakes by claiming a breakthrough, yet still haven't answered the first questions put to you. Do so now, please.

In order to know that Earth holds the only life, in that billion years we would have searched all over for it. And in the process, we would be seeding the galaxies system by system with life. In all that time, I can also assume there was nothing else that suggested religion might be more of an explanation than it is now. After a billion years of pretty much what we have now evidence-wise, why would religion seem like a better answer?