Phi for All

... and a selfish lack of support by the wealthy... Because I really think the wealthy have made these programs look bad so they can siphon even more funding from them for programs they receive more direct benefit from.

Whoa, who are YOU to mess with the GOP platform?

! Moderator Note Sorry, we're a science discussion forum. This isn't the place to advertise your video, or to perform a lecture. If you want to discuss paint-making, and can keep the discussion here onsite, feel free to open another thread about it. You can link references, of course, but the membership prefers not to be forced to watch videos to get your perspective. Thread closed, video removed per Rule 2.7.

But this is a science discussion, and your "feelings", while real for you, aren't objective enough to be meaningful to those of us dealing with reality. And what does any of this do to support your assertion of life after death? You have failed to support that at all.

This seems different from wanting someone else to be worse off than you. This seems more like having a friend borrow money for rent, then you run into them later at a bar where they're smoking and having drinks. As long as the loan is repaid, it shouldn't matter what it's spent on. But it seems wrong that help was needed with a necessity when luxuries are still being purchased, doesn't it? In the case of welfare, the system seems destined for eternal arguments on what are necessities and what are luxuries. And nobody is publishing figures on how welfare gets repaid when a person gets back on their feet and helps the economy thrive, so people assume it's a handout instead of a loan, and think they can control the way the money is spent. This is why it's so detrimental to have so much wealth concentrated at the top. All the benefits that have been slowly siphoned off over the years are very visible now in our emasculated middle class. We now know the tricks used to fool us, and some folks are waiting for someone to come along and make it right. These same folks helped vote in the clowns who took away consumer and worker protections, so it's going to be a long wait. I don't disagree with the whole not-wanting-to-be-last argument, but I think it becomes a very diminished problem if we have far fewer uber-rich and uber poor. This disparity seems to be at the heart of so many of our problems.

I think it's safe to say that those questioning the capability of something should really do better at understanding it first. Too many people using their own definitions of things like logic, and theory.

I don't believe this. I would like to test it out sometime, but first we'd need to start from a point of general overall prosperity, as a baseline. I think if people have enough to participate in their own society, so they can afford to buy the things they help make, and participate in tourism, and educate their children, and save for old age, and splurge on a nice meal out every now and then, they don't bother as much with envy.

OK, NOBODY gets to use these words for the next four years!

That bit Kobach's sleeve is blocking about "...immediately to forestall future lawsuits" is probably talking about shutting down Drumpf's Twitter account. Glad it's Page One for Homeland Security.

This statement is so detached from reality that it makes me think you're trolling. With both Trump and Pence's history of abusing minority Americans, I find your defense of their "protection" insulting and inhuman. Way to go.

I can only go by the ones intelligent enough to vote.

! Moderator Note If you're prepared to present evidence in a scientific attempt to support your assertions of mind control, please open a thread in Speculations. Please remember that you will need evidence in the OP; no unsupported claims at all. Hearsay and anecdotes are NOT evidence. We're looking for points that would stand up in a court of law, basically. There are plenty of places on the web to discuss this without this methodology, but here we don't chase conspiracies and we don't give medical advice. This thread is closed.

Making the US weak enough to allow Putin to do what he likes in his own region seems more likely than doing it to attack the US, don't you think?

It's because he's lying like a salesman, not a politician. He's lying to set the stage, so when he tells the truth you'll grab at it like a nugget of gold and give it more weight than you would have if he hadn't set the stage with all those lies. It works in a Hollywood sort of way. We were blown away by Spielberg's dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and equally blown away when we learned that there was only 6 minutes of CGI in the whole movie. Trump lies for the same reason a salesman might start bidding exorbitantly high, in hopes that it will increase the final offer. He suggests ludicrous things that shock people, in hopes that they'll view what he actually does in a better light. He'll get border security that's merely unnecessary and expensive, instead of preposterous and crippling. He'll settle for harmful and costly because he's been spouting off about deadly and ruinous. Unfortunately for us, I think the rest of the world is not so gullible as half the US.

Alfred E. Neuman, MAD Magazine's "What, me worry?" Kid. A body at rest. We'll miss him sorely. Martin was such a passionate cosmologist. He also had a charming way of dealing with the crackpots, where he simultaneously encouraged their wonderment and imagination, AND gave them multiple helpful links to a dozen hours of study.

I think, with your personality type, you should be confident enough to just sit back and do nothing. Let them find you. Seriously.

Science forums everywhere benefit from Janus and D H. Always a pleasure having them with us. Is Martin still around? I miss him. You learn a lot reading Martin's posts, always.

I would say it depends on the personality type you're looking for. No-nonsense people tend to wear no-nonsense clothing, they get right to business with little chit-chat. But not all types are going to be visibly identifiable. Often hard to distinguish between those who like to listen and those who are afraid to talk.

I'm seeing Trump's Misleading Vividness strategy succeeding with the fearful. He implies things that are so crazy and ludicrous, that when he backs off to the merely horrible level, conservatives say to themselves, "Oh, well, THAT's not so bad!", denying the fact that if he'd started out with horrible, these same conservatives would have slammed the door on him.

Over the last decade, we've tried doing without some sections based on the argument in the OP. All it did was decrease traffic, which increased the ratio of noise to signal in many discussions. Ultimately, our goal wasn't to compete with larger, stricter science forums, but rather to provide a place where many interesting things can be discussed rationally, civilly, and with an eye towards providing supported opinions where opinions might be meaningful. We're a science discussion forum that includes just about anything you want to discuss scientifically, even if it's not science. As far as Speculations go, we owe a great debt to the experts we have on staff and to the knowledgeable, long-time, professional and amateur members for their patience in being the tethers that reel in some of our wildest jumpers after they've landed on poor conclusions. Without their generosity with temporal resources, we couldn't have as much freedom to explore, fail, and learn as we do. Thanks, people. It's good to get the input. We're dedicated to providing a middle ground between peer review and Wild West guesswork, and in between there's a lot of judgement calls, and I know the Politics section gets messy more often than we'd like, but we've found it's an area, like Religion, where emotions play a bigger part in our perceptions. Ultimately, it's interesting, so it gets discussed. Since it's discussed here, we try to do that rationally, civilly, with more critical thinking than emotion (hopefully).

! Moderator Note Moved to Engineering.

So, you'll follow the rules as soon as someone can make science do something it's not designed for, to support a point nobody is making, so you can be right about why dimensions are measurable by humans?

Like the Russian meddling into our elections, and the Republican stonewalling of the judicial appointment process, I don't know why more People aren't protesting media in a trust position that can't be trusted. I see this as a national security issue ultimately. An informed public is critical in any democracy. If you can't trust the information you see ON THE FRICKIN' NEWS, how can your decisions be meaningful for you and your family? How can we feel anything but manipulated by this modern media process? Life in the US has become a minefield of misinformation, and there are no islands to steer towards if Trump sets his sights on defunding National Public Radio, which I'm sure his new stategist is just itching to do. Bannon must hate NPR.

Since you seem to have an incomplete picture personally, aren't you just projecting that lack onto science? If you don't know GR, how are you analyzing answers about time that pertain to it?

I've heard a number of stories confirming the "staging" of media events to make them more sensational and viewer-worthy. I was hoping it would be better with a state-run media than it is in the US, where news outlets are free to make up the status of various situations to spice up the news. People change the channel when it's correctly reported that the situation was handled well, but they stay glued when you tell them "It's complete chaos here...".